24 October 2021
About 20 summers ago I had dinner with an older couple and several former students.
All the former students are still single, still searching for the “perfect” mate.
The man in the older couple said: “What you need is to stop searching for the perfect mate and let
your parents arrange a wedding for you.”
“But what about love?” said one of the students.
“That’s impossible,” said the other man, “but you’d probably choose badly.
“But how can you marry someone you don’t love?” said one of the former students.
The older man said: “Marrying is the easy part, infatuation is the easy part, learning to love, choosing to love day after day is the hard part, especially the day after you know she has given you her cold and both of you are miserable.”
One of the students asked: “Did you love your wife when you married her?”
“No,” replied the older man. “At best I thought I did.”
“Do you love her now?” asked one of the students.
The older man looked across the table at his wife and with great dignity and honesty held up the index finger and thumb of his hand and said: “A little.”
You know, Bartimeaus comes to the Lord out of his own need: “Lord, I want to see.”
There is no great love there, only the gamble of someone who has nothing else to lose–and infatuation with the possibility of sight.
The interesting thing is that after he is healed, the Lord says to him: “Go on your way.”
Bartimeaus could have walked away at this point.
Nothing else was required. So many others had done it before him.
You’ll notice that very few of the people Jesus healed actually became his disciples.
However, when Jesus says: “Go on your way,”
the Marcan author tells us that Bartimeaus–with total freedom–doesn’t go away, but:
Follows him up the road.”–And we know the road at this point, is the road to Jerusalem.
The point for us:
Each of us comes to the Lord for different reasons.
But we can only stay and follow him up the road, if we choose to,
if we choose day by day to love him–even in the disasters of our lives.
And it will not be so bad if in the end, when he asks us: “Do you love me?”
We can with all honesty and integrity say, “A little, I believe.”