Eleven Days!

A man at a swimming pool, a trip that should have taken two weeks, and why your pastor is an existentialist.

There’s a pool in Jerusalem with five covered porches, and it is full of people waiting for the water to move.

That’s the local belief — every so often the surface stirs, and whoever gets in first gets healed. So the porches are packed with the blind, the lame, the paralyzed, all of them watching that water like men watching a lottery drawing. It is, when you think about it, a terrible system. The prize goes to whoever is fastest. At a pool. For people who cannot walk.

And there’s a man there who has been sick for thirty-eight years.

Thirty-eight. Not thirty-eight days. He has been lying on that porch longer than most of you have been married. He was there before some of the other sick people were born.

Jesus walks up, looks at him, and asks him a question that sounds almost rude when you read it out loud:

“Do you want to get well?”

Now. That is a yes-or-no question. Anybody in this church could answer it in under a second.

Here’s what the man says.

“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am going, somebody else steps down ahead of me.”

That is not a yes.

It is not even a no.

That is a grievance with a thirty-eight-year filing history, and he has it memorized, and he has clearly delivered it before.

Here’s the Part That Ought to Bother You

The excuse was true.

That’s what gets me. He wasn’t lying. Nobody did help him. Somebody faster did get there first, every single time, for almost four decades. If you had put him under oath, every word of that answer would have held up.

And it was still the wrong answer.

Because there’s a difference between a statement being accurate and a statement being useful, and most of us have never once made that distinction about our own lives.

Nobody in my family ever went to college. True.

He walked out when I was nine and never sent a dime. True.

The economy tanked the exact year I graduated. True.

My mother was cruel and never apologized for one minute of it. True.

They passed me over and gave it to a man half my age with a quarter of my experience. True.

Every one of those can be one hundred percent accurate and still be a porch you have been lying on for thirty-eight years.

And notice what Jesus does not do.

He does not argue with the excuse.

He does not investigate it, ask for names, or express sympathy about the pool logistics.

He does not say tell me more about that.

He says: Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.

Which Is Why I’m an Existentialist, and My Session Can Sit Back Down

Let me say the fancy word out loud and then take all the air out of it.

Existentialism, boiled down past all the French cigarettes and black turtlenecks, is one idea:

You don’t get to pick what happens to you, but you are the one who decides what it means.

That’s it.

Meaning isn’t handed to you in the mail.

It doesn’t come attached to the event. You assign it.

Now, before somebody calls the presbytery on me — the man generally credited with fathering the whole thing was Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian so intense about the faith that he spent his career trying to get church people to actually believe something instead of just being Danish on Sunday.

The philosophy didn’t start in a coffee shop. It started with a believer.

And frankly, Scripture got there several thousand years earlier, because the Bible is relentlessly, almost annoyingly, about choosing.

Choose this day whom you will serve.

I have set before you life and death — choose life.

Do you want to get well?

God keeps putting the verb in your hands.

He does not hand people a mood.

He hands them a decision, and He asks it out loud, and He waits.

Eleven Days

Let me show you the meanest verse in Deuteronomy, and I mean that with love.

Deuteronomy 1:2. Moses is starting his big farewell speech, and before he says one inspiring thing, he drops this in like a man setting a receipt on the table:

It is eleven days’ journey from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea.

Eleven days.

That’s the trip. From the mountain where they got the commandments to the doorstep of the promised land is an eleven-day walk. Two weekends and a Wednesday.

It took them forty years.

Now put yourself in that camp. You are forty years older. You have buried your parents in the sand. Your children are middle-aged and have never seen a permanent building. And somebody finally gets around to mentioning that the whole thing was supposed to be a two-week hike.

What do you do with that?

Because here is the thing — they had to assign meaning to those forty years, or the entire nation was going to conclude that God was either cruel or incompetent, and there was no third option available on the porch.

And look at what Moses actually tells them it meant. Deuteronomy 8: it was to humble you and to test you, to find out what was really in your heart, to teach you that a person does not live on bread alone.

Read that again, because it’s not what we’d have written.

He does not say the forty years were a punishment they should feel bad about — although the record is clear about how they got there.

He says the forty years were about finding out what was in them.

The difference between an eleven-day trip and a forty-year one was never the map.

It was what got assigned to the delay.

And I’d point out that the generation that finally crossed over was the one raised entirely in the wilderness.

The people who inherited the promise were the people who had never known anything but manna and moving.

Somebody had to decide what those years were for.

Moses did. Out loud. In front of everybody. It’s in the book.

The Man Who Added a Stage

There’s a psychologist named David Kessler who spent decades in hospice work. He worked with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — the woman who gave the world the five stages of grief — and co-wrote a book with her. Thousands of people learned how to mourn from what this man wrote down.

In 2016, his twenty-one-year-old son died.

The man who wrote the book on grief had to bury his own child.

And here’s what he did next. He went back to the famous five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and he added a sixth.

He called it finding meaning.

His argument, out of the worst year of his life, was that acceptance is not enough to live on. You can fully accept that somebody is gone and still have absolutely nothing to get out of bed for. What carries a person forward is meaning.

And here’s the part that matters for you and me: Meaning does not arrive.

Nobody mails it to you.

It is not going to show up when enough time has passed, which is the single biggest lie in the grief business.

Time does not heal wounds or find meaning for you.

God and You do!

Meaning gets made.

On purpose.

Usually with your hands. Almost always before you feel like it.

The expert got handed his own test, and the test changed the answer key.

Now Let Me Go First

I’m not going to ask you to do something I dodge, so here’s mine.

A car wreck. Somebody ran into a car I loved and had finally paid off. And for about a month my assigned meaning was this is unfair and I am owed something. That’s a real option. You can pick that one. It’s popular. It just doesn’t grow anything. The meaning I’ve landed on since is less flattering and more useful: I had gotten comfortable, and comfortable is a very short walk from asleep, and God has never once needed my permission to wake me up. Life is short and mine almost ended.

Pride, wearing a calling as a costume. There have been seasons where I took a road because it flattered me, and then went back and asked God to bless the thing I’d already decided on. I have prayed for direction with my turn signal already on. If you want to know the difference between a call and an ego, ask which one you’d still want if nobody ever found out you did it.

Trusting my own abilities. I’m good at a handful of things. That is the most dangerous sentence in my life. Competence is the most respectable idol in the American church, and it has a parking spot near the door. Nobody’s ever pulled a pastor aside and said brother, you’re leaning too hard on your own giftedness. They just put you on another committee.

And this one is the real one: Trying too hard and not trusting enough. I have prayed Thy will be done at nine o’clock and then stayed up until one in the morning making sure Thy will got a little help from me. That is not faith with hustle attached. That is unbelief with a good work ethic.

None of that was God’s doing. I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where people get hurt by half a sentence.

The Guardrail, Said Plainly

Assigning meaning to a thing is not the same as saying God did it.

I am not telling you God gave your wife a health challenge to deepen your prayer life. I’m not telling you God arranged the layoff, the accident, the diagnosis, the man who hurt you when you were eleven. Some of what happened to you was somebody’s sin, some of it was a broken world doing what broken things do, and some of it was your own hand on the wheel.

Paul says God works in all things. Works in. Not causes. There’s a canyon between those two prepositions and people fall into it every day.

You’re not being asked to call the wreck a gift. You’re being asked what you’re going to do with the parts.

He Never Asked About the Thirty-Eight Years

Go back to that porch, because here’s the thing I cannot get over.

Jesus asks the man exactly one question, and it points forward.

He doesn’t ask how it happened. He doesn’t ask whose fault it was. He doesn’t ask what the man had done, or what his parents had done, or whether he’d been trying hard enough for thirty-eight years, or why nobody in his family ever carried him down to that water.

Not one question about the past. Not one.

Do you want to get well is a question about tomorrow, asked of a man with nothing but yesterdays.

And I think I know why. The past was already handled. It was headed for a hill outside the city, and the Man asking the question was going to carry it there Himself. That’s the only thing that makes the question fair. He can afford to ignore this man’s history because He has already made arrangements for it.

Which means the only thing left to talk about is what happens next.

That’s not Jesus being dismissive of your pain. That’s Jesus refusing to negotiate with your porch.

So Answer the Question

Not a reflection. A verb, and a date.

One. Answer it honestly first. Do you want to get well? Sit with how uncomfortable that is. Because some of us have built an entire identity on the excuse, and getting well means losing the one thing people reliably give us attention for. If the answer is not really, not yet — say that out loud to God. He can work with an honest no. He has never once been able to do a thing with a polite yes.

Two. Write the sentence. Three parts, and don’t soften any of them:

This happened. I did not choose it. Here is what I am going to do with it.

If you can’t fill in the third part yet, write the first two and put a date on the page for when you’ll come back. A thing without a date is a wish.

Three. Pick one action that only makes sense if the meaning you assigned is true. Make the call. Write the letter. Start the class. Volunteer where you were once the one who needed help — that’s the most direct exchange rate there is between a bad year and a useful one.

Four. Tell one person what you decided it means. Out loud, to a face. Meaning you keep to yourself evaporates about as fast as a New Year’s resolution.

Eleven days, church.

The distance was never the problem. It never is. The question is what you’re going to call the forty years, and whether you’re going to spend one more summer on that porch explaining, accurately, why nobody ever put you in the water.

He’s not asking you to explain it.

He’s asking if you want to get up.

The Best Is Yet to Come

Pastor John (Rookie Roberts)

John 5:1–9 · Deuteronomy 1:2 · Deuteronomy 8:2–3 · Joshua 24:15 · Romans 8:28