Empty swimming pool
In the book of John 5, there was a very interesting story of a young man who has been very sick for 38 years. Interestingly, in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate, there was a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda. It is surrounded by five covered colonnades and a great number of disabled people —the blind, the lame, the paralyzed used to lie there. They were lying there in hope that an angel will stare the pool and it will suddenly contain some healing power but unfortunately, the healing only works for the first person to jump in.
Day in, day out, people with simpler problems were jumping in ahead of people with complex problems like this paralyzed man, yet this man kept hope alive that one day somebody will come to his rescue and give him the needed push to enter into the pool. He kept hoping for over three decades because the only way out that he could see is the pool.
One day Jesus came around and asked him a very simple question “Do you want to be healed?” For someone who has been six for 38 years, I would have expected that he would be so desperate to say “Yes, whatever you can use, just heal me” instead look at how he answered in John 5: 7 “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.”
There you have it, the creator of heaven and earth who can heal him was right beside him but instead of taking his help, he was busy complaining about how he had nobody to help him get into the pool. Why? because the pool is all he can see.
Sometimes, I’ve seen people waste their time on things they should have let go a long time ago but because they do not have an open mind, they think that the direction they are facing is the only way home.
This paralysed man must have thought to himself if the pool is healing everybody why not me? Well, ‘what is good for Sikira is not always good for Sikiru’. Keep an open mind my brother so that you’re not stuck at the pool when God had already made another way.
Therefore, I pray for you this morning the prayer of serenity; that God will grant you the serenity to accept the things you can’t change, the courage to change the things you can change, and the wisdom to differentiate between the two in Jesus name.
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