No Punishment for Your Best

This week is a short and simple concept. Even so, it has changed my perspective on life and has often given me the courage to do really hard things. The concept is that you will never ever be punished for doing your best to do what’s right. Here’s this week’s story.

In Mark chapter 5 we read about two people with very tragic trials in their lives. The first is Jairus. He opens the story by running to find Jesus because his daughter is at the point of death. He is also a prominent leader, probably a Pharisee (imagine what it must have felt like to have all the power in the city, but knowing that you have no power to do anything to save your child’s life!).

Jairus comes to Jesus and begs that Jesus come with him to his house to save his 12 year old daughter. Jesus takes compassion on him and starts to follow him. They are slow moving, however, because there is a huge crowd that is pushing and pulling on Jesus.

Meanwhile, there is the woman known as “the woman with the issue of blood”. She had some sort of blood disease that left her very sick. For 12 years she had battled with this disease, paying for many doctors until all of her money was gone, but to no avail. In short, she heard that Jesus is coming down the street and rushed out with the faith that if she could just touch his clothes, she would be healed. She manages to fight through everyone, touch him, and is instantly healed of her disease. She tries to quietly slip away, miracle obtained, but Jesus feels the power that she accessed by her faith and stops to finish teaching her about love, forgiveness and healing.

Meanwhile, Jairus is a father with a daughter moments away from death. There is no written evidence that he intervened during this miracle that Jesus paused to perform for this woman, however I don’t think it’s very difficult to imagine what he must have been feeling. Here he came during his hour of need to bring the Savior to his daughter to save her. They weren’t making very good time to get to his house because of the huge crowd of people following Jesus, and here Jesus was stopping mid-convoy to heal a woman! If it were me, who hasn’t personally felt the love a parent has for a child, I would be more than a little impatient and anxious. Even if he didn’t say anything or act impatient, I’m sure that a lot of things were running through his head that were less than charitable. At least they would have been running through mine.

During this healing, a servant comes and tells Jairus that it is too late, his daughter is dead. I imagine again the horrible pain this must have brought Jairus, crushing down upon him. It was too late. Yet Jesus had time for someone else. This was more than a small trial of faith.

And yet, Jesus sensed what must have been obvious despair and told Jairus “Be not afraid, only believe” (Mark 5:36). They went on to Jairus’ house, in spite of the ridicule of non-believers, and Jesus raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Imagine the relief, joy, and strengthened faith that Jairus and his wife must have felt.

There are a lot of lessons that we can learn from this story. My focus today, however, is that Jairus did his best to be faithful under a lot of pressure. He probably lost his cool and doubted in the mercy of Christ when his daughter’s life was seemingly traded for the healing of another woman, randomly found by the way. Sometimes we feel that we are so desperately in need of help, and perhaps through our own initiation we seek out that help, only to have our needs deferred to another also in need. However, we are never punished for doing our best to do what is right.

Jesus took this time to teach a lesson. All things in life are reversible in His hands. Everything that has ever gone wrong in our life can be made whole and have the damaging effects erased. We will never go without because we exercised whatever little faith and patience we had, even if it was barely enough for the miracles we expected in our time frame and extremely lacking for the actual miracle and His time frame.