Take Heart; Get Up, He Is Calling You

As [Jesus] and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
(Mark 10:46-52, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

You have more in common with Bartimaeus than you might think. 

Please don’t feel as if I’m singling you out! I do, too.

Most of us have experienced, in a spiritual sense, some sort of affliction, some state of dis-ease with the world. You may feel unlovable. You may feel inadequate. Some folks become convinced of the futility of existence. Others find it impossible to believe in anything beyond the brutal reality of the material world. Some people don’t face anything nearly so stark, but whatever they do feel leaves them off-balance, not quite at home in the world. 

(I should emphasize: I’m not speaking about clinical depression. While I do have personal experience with general anxiety disorder, and traits that strongly suggest some form of neurodivergence, that hardly makes me a mental health expert. If you believe you are experiencing a mental health crisis, at any level of severity, please seek help from a qualified professional.)

Whatever we’re facing, sometimes we all feel like calling out for help.

We all want to find something that can, as George Fox famously put it, speak to our condition—and not just speak to it, but fix it, too.

Fox recognized the one who could speak to his condition as “Christ Jesus.” That worked for many generations of Quakers and still works for many today. Other Friends, and billions of others around the world, have a different name for it. Let’s not get caught up in that discussion just now.

So: We bear our suffering, day after day, until one day we hear about the possibility of relief. Like Bartimaeus, we cry out, begging for help—not literally, perhaps, but in ways that people around us can, if they’re paying attention, see the intensity of our need.

The throng of people between Jesus and Bartimaeus could not avoid recognizing that the blind beggar wanted help. For whatever reason, some of them didn’t want to know about his pain, so they told him to shut up. But he didn’t. He pushed harder. He could sense a solution to his problems—maybe even an answer to his prayers—within reach, and he refused to let it pass him by.

Now, the… let’s call it a “power,” that seems neutral enough to satisfy Christians and non-Christians, theists and non-theists. The power that can speak to our condition? It wants to help us. It welcomes our entreaties. Ask and you shall receive and all that.

So when Jesus heard Bartimaeus’ shouts over the noise of the crowd—and you can imagine the size of the crowds that surrounded Jesus just outside a town like Jericho, still buzzing with excitement after one of his sermons, before it started getting late and people realized they needed to get home for dinner… When Jesus heard Bartimaeus over all those fans, he stopped and put all his attention on hearing out this one man.

Now people came to Bartimaeus and said, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” They may have spoken more gently to him this time. Or they may have spoken with urgency, maybe even dragging Bartimaeus toward Jesus, eager themselves to learn what might happen next.

Whatever their mood, I want to focus on this moment, instead of the part where Bartimaeus asks to see again and Jesus tells him his faith has made him well.

I want to call your attention there because we should all take heart as well. 

The one who can speak to our condition hears our cries for help, sometimes before we even realize we’re crying out, and calls to us in this very moment.

My mind turns to the Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen, and in particular his book The Wounded Healer, in which he discusses the need to acknowledge and even embrace our spiritual pain before we can begin to heal from it—and, just as importantly, before we can begin to help heal others.

“When we are not afraid to enter into our own center and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own soul, we come to know that being alive means being loved,” Nouwen wrote. That knowledge gives us hope, and hope allows us “to create space for Him whose heart is greater than [ours], whose eyes see more than [ours], and whose hands can heal more than [ours].”

Again, you don’t have to believe in the same God and Jesus as Henri Nouwen or George Fox. (Lord knows I don’t.) You don’t even have to believe that Jesus really cured a man named Bartimaeus of blindness with a few simple words. (Although stranger things have happened.)

You should have hope, though. Because hope allows us to move forward, to internalize the understanding that our spiritual conditions don’t limit us—they give us a starting point.