Diseases all around

For he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him.
Mark 3:10

When my kids were little, I hated going to the pediatrician’s waiting room. We were surrounded by coughing kids, runny noses, hands touching everything. If you weren’t sick when you got there, you could be before you left.

So when I read Mark 3:10, in many ways, frankly, it sounds horrible.

How gross the sights of diseased and deformed people crushing in, tighter and tighter. How repulsive the associated odors. How scary the howls and groans of the demon-possessed.

Could I have been a follower of Jesus back then, if it meant being squeezed by crowds like this, everywhere we went?

Yesterday at my church, I wasn’t shoved in a crowd a single time. I neither saw nor smelled any unbathed people. Nobody even coughed on me in hot, sticky air.

But neither did I see the desperate look in a parent’s eye, believing for a healing. Nor the excited anticipation that Jesus was about to do a miracle. Nor the exultation from a blind man that could now see.

Can I be a follower of Jesus now? ...