To a woman bent over for eighteen years
You know those cracks across the ground so well. You know the dust that swirls around your feet as you walk—weary, laden—down the street carrying more heartache than you care to tell. “Where are you, God?”, a voice inside you yells (or sometimes screams) and no one that you meet can answer that or tell you why life’s beat and battered you and left you in this cell. Today it ends. Come, daughter, stand up straight. My hands were made to heal, my back to bear a world of sorrows, a galaxy of griefs. So give me yours and I will take their weight while you walk tall and free and learn to care for answers less. Instead, I give myself.
She’s another nameless character, the woman whom Jesus heals in a synagogue after she’s spent almost two decades unable to stand up straight. Was she rich or poor? Short or tall? Married or single? The sort of person you’d love to have a cup of tea with or the type that you find youself sidling away from at a dinner party? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter. We can see ourselves in her and that is enough.
As I think of the things that have weighed me down over the years, I want to ask, “Why?” I want to yell or scream “Where were you?” Even in areas of my life where I can see healing, I wonder why the breaking and bruising had to be there in the first place. I want answers—at once and in black and white, thank you very much—but they’re not what I need. What I need is to learn, like Orual, that the answer is, in fact, a person. What I need is Jesus.