Me, M.D.

John 11:17-27

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days
• if you had been here, my brother would not have died
• I am the resurrection and the life
• I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God

Applying the Word to My Life:
A few years ago I decided I needed to finally get around to having a physical. It had been quite a while and I'd been putting it off. The thing is, I already knew what my doctor was going to say — I needed to lose weight and get some exercise. So before I made the appointment, I told myself I'd get my diet and exercise in order first — lose some weight, build some good habits, walk in having already done the hard part. It sounded responsible. It also meant I spent weeks putting the physical off before I let a trained professional weigh in.

That's backwards, and I knew it even while I was doing it. Getting healthy isn't a prerequisite for seeing a doctor — it's what the doctor is there to help with. Treating it as something to accomplish before the appointment meant I missed out on their actual expertise for however long I put it off, and if I'd gotten something wrong on my own, I could have made it worse before anyone with real knowledge ever looked at it.

Martha does the opposite when Jesus finally arrives, four days after Lazarus has died. She doesn't manage her grief privately first and present Him with a composed version of herself once she's worked through it. She goes out to meet Him on the road and leads with the hard part — telling Him plainly that His absence cost her brother's life. And in the same breath, she adds that she still believes God will give Him whatever He asks. She doesn't resolve the tension between those two admissions before she voices them. She just brings both, together, straight to Him.

Jesus doesn't wait for her to sort herself out either. He meets her exactly there, in the mix of grief and trust, and puts the real question to her directly: does she believe He is the source of life itself, even now. What she says back is remarkable: I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world. At this point in Jesus' ministry, that's a fuller statement of who Jesus actually is than anything we've heard from the Twelve.

That's not a different Martha than the one who told Jesus, plainly, that she needed help back when Mary left her to serve alone. It's the same willingness to bring Him whatever is actually true — the complaint, the grief, the confusion — instead of managing it herself first. That willingness is what's grown, over time, into an understanding of who He is that goes deeper than almost anyone else's in the story. That willingness has helped her have one of the healthiest relationships with Jesus we can see in the Bible.

It's tempting to treat our own struggles the way I treated my health — something to get under control before we bring it to God, so we can show up with the version of ourselves that's already fixed. But that gets it backwards twice over. We lose whatever wisdom He actually has for the situation while we're stuck handling it alone, and depending on what we're dealing with, managing it without Him can do real damage before anyone with real power over it ever gets involved.

Martha's faith didn't grow by getting her grief in order before she brought it to Jesus — it grew because she never waited that long in the first place.

My Response for Today:
Today I will bring one thing I've been trying to handle on my own straight to God, unresolved.