Do You Want to Be Well?

This past weekend I stood in front of 470 Young Life leaders at Crooked Creek Ranch.

The sun was out. The leaves were turning. And the room was full of people who have decided, for no good practical reason, to spend their lives on teenagers. You can feel that kind of energy when you walk into a room. It has a temperature.

Saturday night was one of those nights.

I've learned not to force those nights, or predict them, or take credit for them. But I know one when I'm in it — when the whole thing feels like there's nothing between here and the Kingdom but a veil, and it's thin, and it's moving.

We were in John 5. The pools. The man who had been lying there for thirty-eight years, who had been there before and was there again, worn into a groove of waiting. And Jesus walks up and asks him the strangest question: "Do you want to be well?"

Not let me fix you. Not here's what you did wrong. Just — do you want this?

The thing I kept coming back to that night is that Jesus went there. To the pools. To the place where the sick and the stuck and the overlooked were piled up waiting for water to move. Nobody else was going to that corner of the city. He went. He always goes. Jesus will always go there.

When I finished, I asked the worship team to come back up. I figured we'd give it fifteen minutes. Maybe a handful of people would want prayer.

It was closer to an hour. And it was not a handful.

I stood in the back of the room, and people came to me. One after another after another. They told me things. Hard things. Things they'd been carrying by themselves for a long time and had apparently decided, that night, in that room, that they were done carrying alone.

I don't have language big enough for what it is to be trusted like that. I only know I was honored by it — by their hearts, by their requests, by the sheer courage it takes to say a true thing out loud to another human being.

J.B. Phillips translates James 5:16 like this: "Get in the habit of confessing to one another and pray for one another..." A habit. Not an emergency measure. A practice, a rhythm, a normal thing you do.

That is what was happening in that room. Not a program. A habit breaking open.

The only way I know to describe it is that it felt like a labor room. There was groaning in it. There was work in it. It was not tidy and it was not fast. And what I watched being born, over and over, in person after person, was freedom.

I think about this a lot: I am so grateful for the seat I have.

Speaking at camp is like officiating a wedding. At a wedding, I've got the best seat in the house — the bride and groom are right there, three feet away, and I'm close enough that I almost feel like an intruder. Something is happening between the two of them that has very little to do with me.

Saturday night was the same. Four hundred and seventy people, and what was actually happening in that room was happening between each of them and their Creator. I just happened to be standing close enough to watch.

He goes there. He always goes there.

And the question isstill on the table: Do you want to be well?