Pastor Nick Gatzke

Alexander Peter Sirk flew five thousand miles to meet a woman he had only ever known online. When he landed at Changsha Airport, China, she wasn’t there. Certain she would eventually come for him, he waited in the terminal. Ten days later he was carried out to a hospital. When a television crew tracked down the woman he travelled so far to see, she said she assumed Alexander was joking.

Few of us have been hospitalized for waiting. But we know what that terminal feels like when hope curdles into hopelessness, patience thins into resentment, and underneath it lies the fear that maybe no one is coming.

The Gospel of Mark chapter 5 sits two people in that terminal at once. One has waited twelve years for healing. The other is about to endure the longest minutes of his life.

Twelve Years and a Few Minutes

Mark tells us that Jesus stepped off a boat into a crowd, and a man came running. Jairus was a ruler of the local synagogue, but he fell at the feet of a carpenter from Nazareth because his little girl was dying. Jairus begged Jesus saying, “Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live” (Mark 5:23).

As Jesus walked with Jairus, from somewhere in the crush a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years touched Jesus’ garment. Jesus immediately stopped and asked, “Who touched my garments?” The disciples found the question absurd—everyone was touching him. But Jesus felt power go out from himself.

Trembling, the woman came forward and told him everything. Her condition made her ceremonially unclean, which meant isolation and the power to defile anyone she touched. She spent everything on physicians, and she was worse, not better.

After twelve years of waiting Jesus healed her. While Jairus and the crowd watched, Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease” (Mark 5:34). Twelve years of disappointment had not made her cynical. She reasoned, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well” (Mark 5:28), then pushed through the crowd, brushed his cloak, and the bleeding stopped.

Mark tells us that Jairus’ daughter was twelve years old. This woman had been bleeding for exactly as long as that little girl had been alive. Jairus was the insider; she was an outcast. He was wealthy; she was penniless. He had a household; she had no one. But waiting brought them to the same place, and to the same person.

Meanwhile, Jairus’ daughter was dying at home and the only man who can help her had stopped in the road to talk. Empty time is what breaks us—not the trouble so much as the stretch of nothing in the middle of it, when it seems no one is doing anything.

Then the worst happens, and it happens during the delay. Messengers arrive from his house, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” (Mark 5:35). Jesus overhears and turns to him, “Do not fear, only believe” (Mark 5:36). Minutes earlier Jairus needed faith that Jesus could heal a sick girl. Now he needs faith that Jesus can raise a dead one.

That is what the delay did. It did not cost him his daughter; it enlarged what he could believe about Jesus. Waiting well means trusting that God is working in what we cannot see—and here we get to watch him do it. Jesus could have let the woman slip back into the crowd, healed but hidden. Instead he called her out publicly, so that her isolation would end along with her illness. He would not be rushed for Jairus, because he was finishing something for her.

Jesus continued on with Jairus. The mourners were wailing, and when Jesus says the child is only sleeping, they laugh. But Jesus went in to the child, took her by the hand, and said, “Talitha cumi,” (Mark 5:41). “Little girl, I say to you, arise.”

He Is Never Late

Some of you have been waiting a long time. For a wandering family member. For physical relief. For company in your loneliness. Some trust Jesus with eternity but struggle to trust him with next month. And some have never brought him the deepest need of all, the forgiveness of sin—though Scripture is plain that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

He has authority over sickness, over wind and wave, over demons, over death itself. He is never early and never late. Let your desperation become dependence, and keep believing.

“A Word From Pastor Nick” is based on Pastor Nick Gatzke’s Bible teaching on A BETTER WORD.