EXPOSED
Healing begins the moment we stop hiding what He already knows.
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Look closely at the image and you will see the tubing to my port hanging there like a chic little tassel.
I was unaware that it had dropped from its hiding place, tucked inside my shirt. Yet there it is, my constant companion revealed and unashamed—
Proof I was here.
Evidence I was ready for healing however it may come.
Exposure is something those of us who follow Jesus are intimately familiar with.
He knows everything about us, even when we try to tuck the messy parts away.
Do you want to be healed?
Jesus gazes intently at the man perched upon his worn, ragged mat.
He does not ask how long he has been there.
He already knows.
I have always found the question unsettling.
Not because the answer feels complicated.
But because healing asks something of us.
Perhaps healing is not merely an event, but an agreement.
A participation.
A loosening.
An honesty that stops rehearsing the familiar wound long enough to ask what life might look like without organizing ourselves around it.
Not blame.
Not accusation.
Just truth.
What do you keep hidden that is, in Heaven, on full display?
His question brings to mind our tendency to circle the same hurts, rehearse the same stories, complain over and over while quietly settling into what is familiar.
Then the next four words—
not request but command:
Get up and walk.
There are two miracles embedded in this story:
The healing touch of a Creator.
The act of will required to walk away from an identity tightly held.
What are you holding onto tightly?
“My cancer.”
How many times have I said this?
How quietly identity settles into suffering.
How easy it becomes to speak of a thing so often that we begin to mistake it for ourselves.
There is no pretending this has not shaped me.
It has.
There is great purpose in sharing this journey with the intention of helping and healing others.
But somewhere inside the asking, I find myself wondering:
What part of suffering did I quietly mistake for identity,
Allowing me to say no to situations that required vulnerability,
Enabling me to emotionally check out when relationships felt difficult,
Explaining away the emotional distancing of a heart on guard,
Providing a reason to hold back joy,
To keep hope in check.
Do you want to be healed?
Of course, you expect me to answer yes.
But perhaps the more honest question is this:
What will healing require me to surrender?
Because there are strange comforts inside our afflictions—Familiarity.
Explanation.
Protection.
Permission.
Even now, I wonder what parts of myself have learned to live inside this chapter and forgotten that there is more of my story.
If this reads like confession, I invite you to join me.
He already knows.
Healing is not an elusive mystery to chase down.
Sometimes it looks like release.
Sometimes agreement.
Sometimes the courage to loosen our grip on the very thing we thought was protecting us.
What would be the harm, at this stage, of exposing yourself?
He already knows what you are holding onto.
He already knows the cost.
NOTES
Sometimes exhaustion, disappointment, grief, illness, heartbreak, fear—or simply time—reveal what effort once covered.
Not to shame us. Only to show us what has quietly taken up residence.
The uncomfortable thing about exposure is this:
sometimes what is hidden is not hidden from the world—
only from ourselves.
Sometimes we become so practiced at carrying something, organizing ourselves around it, explaining ourselves through it…that we stop noticing how tightly we have wrapped our hands around it.
A few revelatory questions, if you’re willing:
What part of suffering have you quietly mistaken for identity?
What have you been calling “mine” so long that you no longer question whether it still belongs to you?
What has become so familiar that you mistake it for truth?
What part of your life feels protected by staying exactly as it is?
If healing required surrender—not striving—what might you need to loosen your grip on?
What part of you has quietly benefited from remaining unhealed?
Image: Look at the man in the fountain*. He stares at his hands as if he has never seen himself. Perhaps not through the eyes of Jesus—Healed. Whole. “Do you want to be healed?” Our Healer’s question isn’t so odd when we place it in context of our disbelief. Healing isn’t “out there somewhere.” It is already embedded in us by the Creator of all things. I sat beside this fountain everyday I was away from home. Healing. It reminds me that my participation is everything. “Get up and walk.” He knows before we do the parts of us that we keep hidden…from Him…from ourselves.
*This breathtaking bronze seated in the fountain is the centerpiece of the tranquil courtyard of the clinic where I bathed myself in healing for nineteen days. The man is the very one Jesus spoke to in Bethesda, “Get up and walk.” What we miss, perhaps, is that healing isn’t optional or just for some but embedded in us the moment we invite the resurrection power of the Living Lord to dwell inside of us. Healing is assumed…then…and now. And that, not anything else, is the centerpiece of my story.