Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Advent Day 11: Only the Sick


Only we, the sick, seek out the physicians among your number.  You healthy ones avoid the healers as if curing the plague is itself a plague.  

Do they remind you, as surely as we do, of your own frailty?  Your own precarious hold on health?  Your own mortality?

Do you fear them, the healers among you, as you so obviously fear us?

You’re right, you know – we will seek after anyone for even a chance at what you take so for granted.  We will make ourselves ridiculous for just a chance at health and healing.  Our desperation makes us vulnerable.  Our need, so obvious even to ourselves, drives us to seek, to yearn for, and to gratefully accept when offered, the help we crave.

Maybe you’re right.  Maybe you don’t need him.  But we do often wonder among ourselves how it is that you cannot see your own limp.*




___________________
It is often scornfully said that the church is a crutch.  Of course it’s a crutch.  So what makes you think you don’t limp?  – William Sloane Coffin

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