One On One: 100 Days With Jesus--Ministry YearsSample

Home Again: The One who gives life back       

Everyone suffers, I know this. Most everyone recovers too, though perhaps scarred. But when my gravest fears were realized, I knew I would not recover. 

Leprosy takes you to your grave inch by inch. First your skin dies, then nerves die. Through the eyes of a monster, you watch your good life rot away. You’re still you, but no one can look past the terror.

Leprosy robs you of feeling till eventually your heart stops, perhaps years before it actually does. You can’t feel love, because you’re not loved anymore. You don’t remember gratitude, because you have nothing left to be thankful for. 

My family conducted my funeral, and I watched from a distance. I was dead to them. My wife screamed my name, “Simon, Simon, my love” and I wasn’t even able to cry.

When the One they called the Healer came to Bethany, I didn’t go to the square where others crowded Him. Hope is a dangerous thing. But Jesus came looking for me. He invited my poor, unclean stump of a hand to touch His. “Do you want to be healed, Simon?”

Did I! Did I? Of course, the miracle He did in a moment restored life to my body but it’s the miracle He did in my heart that won’t stop these tears from coming, even today.

I sit across from Him now at my family’s table. I said, “You always have a place in my home, Jesus,” and to my surprise, He came. 

To my home, to my table, to my heart. My wife smiling again, calls us to a feast. My grandson on my knee. I look now across the happy uproar of plates passing and wine pouring and music playing and favor flowing—to meet the eyes of my Healer looking intensely back at me. What do I see in His eyes? Love, pure love. 

This glad kind of love, captured in this moment, is what He came to give you and me forever. He stared death in the face and defeated it to give us life, this glad kind of eternal life. Someday when sin and sickness are gone forever, you and I will sit around the table like this again, together and with Him. 

I once was dead, and now I’m alive for the first time—body, spirit, and soul. All because He came looking for me. 

Only when my grandson reached up to grab my chin did my gaze break from His and the music filled my ears again. Now Jesus laughs with my children, tears glistening in His eyes as we break bread. 

If it took the mystery of where I’ve come from to give me this today, I am a grateful man. And you? Say with me, too, “make my heart your home, Lord Jesus.” 

Tomorrow: One on one with the One who satisfies