By the Sheep Gate (II)

How to make sense of all the years before
he took your hand and pulled you to your feet?
The helplessness you felt there in the dust
with legs that wouldn’t work, the fleeting hopes
of healing crushed as others trampled past
and you were left behind again. The sense 
of hopelessness. Another sun would set
and leave you just as lame as when it rose.
But you had known, when he looked in your eyes
that he had seen you. Not a single day
was sad enough or small enough to slip
unnoticed past that steady gaze of love
in which (you found) you always had been held.

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A dear friend of mine would sometimes say, when talking about something painful, that it would be “like waters gone by”. It was her quaint and lovely way of saying that that hard thing wouldn’t last forever. One day, in this life or the next, it would vanish.

Hard things that vanish in this life, however, don’t usually vanish without trace. The waters leave their mark. Memories remain. This sad or bad or terrible thing happened and we have to come to terms with the fact that it did. Jesus’ healing of the man by the pool put a wonderful end to his present sufferings but did not, in and of itself, negate all the terrible years that had come before. All will indeed be well one day, but until then, how can we live with and make sense of the history of our sufferings?

In The Chosen, the story of Nathanael being called by Christ is imaginatively brought to life in a way that deeply resonated with me. Jesus’ statement that he saw Nathanael under the fig tree is portrayed not merely a way to prove who he is, unconnected to anything in Nathanael’s life. Rather, under the fig tree is where we see Nathanel at breaking point, crying in desperation for the Lord not to hide his face from him. “Do you see me?” he hurls at the empty sky. When Philip later brings him to Jesus, Jesus tells Nathanael, “When you were in your lowest moment, I did not turn my face from you. I saw you.”

To be seen. That is what we want, isn’t it? We will never have answers to all our whys. The waters will leave their mark. But to know that we are seen, that we are held in love’s steady gaze, and that we were, in fact, held there all along makes it possible to live with our scars until the day of full and final healing.