Healed for Service.

(Mt 20:29-34; Mk 10:46-52; Lk 18:35-43)

Once we are healed, once we have acknowledged, sought, and accepted healing.  We can go forward with confidence to answer God’s call. We must not take for granted this gift of wholeness, but rather ought to respond with the gift of self in some mode. 

            There were two blind men on the road who persuaded Jesus to heal them.  Jesus did not need much persuasion, as he was “moved with pity”.  He, as usual, touched their eyes.  The usual pattern of acknowledge: they knew the were blind. Seek: they asked Jesus for His mercy. Accept: they allowed themselves to be touched. But then what happened?

“Immediately they received their sight, and followed him.”

            There was no time wasted in either their healing or their response to healing. They did not merely run off and shout to the crowds that they could see, nor did they go off and forget all about him.  Rather, these men were immediately healed and they followed him. 

            The life of humanity is besought by many fears and anxieties. We often seek to ‘do’ before we seek to ‘be’.  We attempt to do things before we have the skill or the character to do them.  In short, we are like blind men – not sitting by the road – but trying to scale a mountain all alone with no tools. We seek to do the impossible, and feel the pains of defeat because it cannot be done. Many young people endlessly search for a vocation, without first understanding who they are and what they really want.

            We must allow Christ into our lives in an intimate way so that we can see clearly the road before us. Only when we can see, only after we have been healed – or at least begun the process of healing – can we follow him.  Only then will we realize that following him is our happiness.  The blind men, after all, were only sitting on the side of the road. AFTER their healing they had the strength and the knowledge to follow him to continue their journey of faith and wholeness.  Let us not wait on the side of the road, but let us call out to Him for help, so that we too might see, believe, and follow Him along the long and narrow road – the road that leads to all joy and peace.

FOLLOW HIM