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    Beside Bethesda: 31 Days Toward Deeper Healing
    Beside Bethesda: 31 Days Toward Deeper Healing
    Beside Bethesda: 31 Days Toward Deeper Healing
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Beside Bethesda: 31 Days Toward Deeper Healing

    By Joni Eareckson Tada

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    About this ebook

    Are you ready for the deep healing Jesus offers?

    Beside Bethesda is 31-day devotional from bestselling author and speaker Joni Eareckson Tada that takes readers on a month-long journey toward the healing God offers—a healing that is deeper and more encompassing than anything we could imagine.

    As Joni relates aspects of her own journey in dealing with the most painful “unanswered prayer” of her life, readers will learn to see beyond potential quick fixes to the deepest and greatest solutions God has for them. As the journey continues, readers will deal with topics such as
    • contentment in the face of unanswered prayer,
    • transformation that occurs through suffering,
    • wrestling with God, and
    • learning to put one’s full confidence in Jesus.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTyndale House Publishers
    Release dateSep 1, 2014
    ISBN9781612917689
    Beside Bethesda: 31 Days Toward Deeper Healing
    Author

    Joni Eareckson Tada

    Joni Eareckson Tada is founder and CEO of Joni and Friends, an organization that communicates the gospel and mobilizes the global church to evangelize, disciple, and serve people living with disability. Joni is the author of numerous bestselling books, including When God Weeps, Diamonds in the Dust, and her latest award-winning devotional, A Spectacle of Glory. Joni and her husband, Ken,were married in 1982. For more information on Joni and Friends, visit www.joniandfriends.org. 

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      Book preview

      Beside Bethesda - Joni Eareckson Tada

      Day 1: Do Not Pass Me By

      I

      F YOU SPEND ANY TIME

      at all with me, you will know that I love the old hymns. I love to hear them, and I love to sing them. But for me, it’s something more than nostalgia or enjoying a particular style of music.

      I don’t just sing hymns because I want to.

      I sing because I have to.

      I remember darker days when I was first injured and in the hospital. I wanted so much to cry—and to just go on crying for the rest of my life. Instead, I would stifle the tears and comfort myself with one of the old hymns of the church:

      Savior, Savior,

      Hear my humble cry;

      While on others Thou art calling,

      Do not pass me by.

      When I sang those words, or even hummed the melody softly to myself late at night in my hospital room, it always reminded me of the pool of Bethesda in John chapter 5. When friends visited me at the hospital, I often asked them to read that passage to me.

      John speaks of one man who had been there, lying beside that pool, for thirty-eight years. The account goes on to say that when Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time (verse 6), He approached the disabled man and asked him a question.

      I can’t tell you how many nights I would picture myself there at the pool of Bethesda, on a blanket, perhaps lying next to the paralyzed man on his straw mat. In my mind’s eye we would lie there, waiting. He would be waiting for an angel to stir up the waters. Then, somehow, he would inch himself over to the pool and slip into it for supernatural healing.

      He was waiting for an angel . . . but I was waiting for Jesus.

      I knew that the Son of God Himself would be coming, stepping out of the bright morning light, slipping under the shade of the colonnades and standing for a moment, looking out at the desperate, nearly hopeless little band of disabled men and women waiting at the water’s edge.

      In my fantasies, I would see Him pausing by the pool, His disciples puzzled by the delay and eager to keep moving toward the temple. And I would cry out to Him, not wanting Him to leave, not wanting Him to miss me, lying on that pavement in the shade of a pillar.

      Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Don’t pass me by. Here I am! Heal me! Help me! Don’t leave me here like this!

      And the truth was, though I couldn’t see it at the time, He had seen me all along. He had known me. He was aware of my fear, my sorrow, my despair, my longings, and my crushing need. He would not—did not—pass me by. He never has passed me by. And He never will, not in all eternity.

      Jesus’ ceaseless watch-care and compassion for us is no fantasy. In Psalm 77, the psalmist reflected on the Lord’s presence during some of the darkest, most turbulent moments of his nation’s history. Your path led through the sea, he recalled, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen (verse 19). In other words, We couldn’t see You or feel You in those heartbreaking, terrifying moments, but looking back, it’s very clear that You led us and protected us every step of the way.

      GOING DEEPER . . .

      Jerusalem says, "The L

      ORD

      has deserted us;

      the L

      ORD

      has forgotten us."

      "Never! Can a mother forget her nursing child?

      Can she feel no love for the child she has borne?

      But even if that were possible,

      I would not forget you!

      See, I have written your name on the palms of my hands."

      ISAIAH 49:14-16,

      NLT

      Have you ever jotted down a phone number on your own hand because you were in a pinch, needed to remember it, and couldn’t find a scrap of paper? Our God has no such memory problems, but to help you understand His constant attention and love, He tells you that He has written your name on the palm of His hand. Carry that mental picture with you into your day . . . and your night.

      Day 2: A Long Time

      "O

      NE WHO WAS THERE

      had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time . . ." (John 5:5-6).

      A few months from now, I will mark an anniversary that is at once a heartbreaking story of loss and an incomparable testimony of God’s faithfulness. As of July this year, I will have been in a wheelchair for forty-seven years.

      Forty-seven years, when compared to the Roman lighthouse at Dover Castle or the pyramids, isn’t much time at all. It’s barely a heartbeat in history, and as nothing compared with eternity. But for a flesh-and-blood, earth-dwelling human being, forty-seven years in a wheelchair is a long time. Trust me on this: 17,155 days of quadriplegia are a great plenty.

      Even Jesus thinks so. When He saw the paralyzed man lying on his mat at the pool of Bethesda, and learned that he had been in that condition thirty-eight years, He understood it to be a long time.

      You have no idea how much I value that phrase in Scripture. A long time. The Lord of all, the One who existed eternally before time, who created time but lives outside of it, whose name is Ancient of Days and Everlasting God, that Jesus feels that living without the use of your legs for thirty-eight years—or forty-seven years—is a long time.

      When the Savior’s eyes rested on the

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