When Jesus Walks into the Pain You Learned to Carry Alone
- Douglas Vandergraph
- 37 minutes ago
- 3 min read
There are chapters in Scripture that feel like poetry, and then there are chapters that feel like truth knocking on the door you’ve been afraid to open. John Chapter 5 is one of those chapters. It steps directly into the places where your strength has been drained, your hope has been delayed, and your heart has grown quiet from waiting too long.
This is not a chapter about quick fixes or soft comfort. It is a chapter where Jesus walks into a crowd of hurting people and goes straight to the one whose pain lasted the longest. A man who had been lying near the pool for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of watching life keep moving while he stayed in the same place. Thirty-eight years of disappointment slowly shaping the way he saw himself.
And Jesus walks right to him.
That alone should touch something deep inside you. Because there are places in your own life where the wait has felt too long, the healing has felt too distant, and the hope has felt too fragile to hold. Yet Jesus still walks toward you. He still sees the thing you don’t talk about. He still notices the pain you’ve learned to normalize.
When Jesus asks the man, “Do you want to be made well?”, He isn’t asking for information. He’s reaching beneath the man’s history and touching the part of him that still remembers what hope felt like. Pain teaches you to answer in explanations, not desires. And that’s exactly what the man does. He tells Jesus why healing hasn’t happened, why it’s too late, why others get there first, why his moment passed him by.
But Jesus doesn’t respond to the explanation. He responds to the need.
He speaks the words that cut through thirty-eight years of disappointment: Rise, take up your bed, and walk.
And the man rises.
Sometimes healing arrives so suddenly that it feels like your soul has to catch up. Sometimes God restores what life has broken faster than you can make sense of it. Sometimes grace confronts what pain tried to turn permanent.
But the moment the man begins walking, opposition shows up. Not from the broken people. Not from the ones who saw him suffer. But from the religious voices who cared more about rules than restoration.
Your healing will bother people who benefit from your brokenness. It will disrupt the expectations of people who only knew you from the version of yourself shaped by pain. But opposition is not a sign that the miracle wasn’t real. It’s proof that freedom disrupts systems built on control.
Jesus confronts those voices not with apology, but with authority. He reveals who He is with a clarity that leaves no room for doubt. The Son moves with the Father. The Son gives life. The Son raises the dead. The Son holds judgment. The Son stands equal with God.
John Chapter 5 is not simply about a man being healed. It’s about the identity of Jesus breaking through the noise of religion, human expectations, and long-standing pain.
And it’s about you. The places where you feel stuck. The years you thought were wasted. The identity you thought was set in stone. The hope you thought was too late to reclaim.
Jesus looks at those places and speaks the same word He spoke that day: Rise.
Rise from the fear. Rise from the memory that still stings. Rise from the disappointment that shaped how you see your future. Rise from the belief that nothing will ever change. Rise from the story that pain tried to write as your final chapter.
Your future is not trapped in your past. Your identity is not tied to your suffering. Your purpose is not buried under your waiting. And your hope is not dead. It’s been quiet, but it’s not dead.
Because Jesus still walks into the places where others have stopped looking. And He still speaks life where life hasn’t been for a long time.
Rise. Take up your story. Walk forward. You are not done. And God has not forgotten the places you’ve been waiting the longest.
— Douglas Vandergraph
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