Do you actually want it to change?

“Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,”

— John 5:2-9 (NIV)

A site matching this description has been dug up in Jerusalem, just north of where the temple stood. Two deep basins cut into rock sit side by side, with steps leading down into them. Four roofed walkways ran round the outside, and the dam dividing the basins is where a fifth would have stood. Those roofs meant shade in heat and cover in rain, so a person could stay there a long time rather than only stop by. Some later copies add a line here about an angel troubling the water. The oldest manuscripts do not have it, and it is probably a copyist explaining what people there believed. The bedding named here has its own Greek word and means the cheapest bed there was, a thin pallet for the poor. Read on a few lines and see who stops him first. Not well-wishers, but guardians of the law, objecting to his load on the rest day. He cannot even tell them who healed him, because by then Jesus had slipped off into the crush. The question about wanting comes first in this scene, the man never quite answers it, and he is put on his feet anyway.

Almost everyone leaves something unfixed so long that waiting stops feeling like waiting. It just becomes the shape of the week. Sometimes it is a dentist you have meant to book since term started. Sometimes a call home that keeps sliding to next week. Sometimes a letter on the shelf you have stopped seeing. So the question lands before anything else: do you actually want this to change? Jesus asked it out loud, before anyone had asked him for anything.

God, there is something I have been leaving undone for a long time. I got used to it and stopped expecting it to change. I do want it to change, and I am saying that out loud. Help me do the part of it that belongs to today. Stay with me while I do it.