There are many experiences in life that seem to require hunkering down and waiting something out. It might be a season that we don’t like or a phase in a child’s behavior, or more globally and apparently more threateningly, a pandemic or political turmoil. Yet, one of Jesus’ healings demonstrates beautifully a vastly more hopeful kind of waiting. 

The Bible tells of a pool called Bethesda surrounded by porches where there was “a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had” (John 5:3, 4). 

One man had been there 38 years. At a time when the average life expectancy was not much more than that, this man must have felt that there was little hope of receiving what he was waiting for—some quasi-magical event—but that he had no choice. When Jesus asked him if he wanted to be healed, the man responded only with an explanation of why such a thing was probably impossible: “Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me” (verse 7).