Choose to live!...‘Do you want to be made well?’ John 5:6 NKJV

He can’t walk, the pool isn’t easily accessible, and there are no motorised lifts. Then Jesus comes along and asks this man who’d been incapacitated for 38 years, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ What a question! Now, Jesus didn’t ask it because He didn’t know the answer; He did it to direct the man’s (and our) thinking along the right lines. He could just as easily have asked: ‘Are you ready to assume responsibility for your life? Do you really want that promotion, or is it easier to just gripe about money? Are you ready for marriage, for somebody who’ll share your life and make you reconsider your self-centred ways?’ Answers to our prayers often come with a price. For example, the family of an addict sometimes spends years praying for change, then when it happens they experience their own crises. Because their lives have centred around drama and dysfunction, they’ve never learned how to live any other way. At that point they have a choice to make: to keep blaming their problems on somebody else, or to accept that they have their own issues to work on. ‘Do you want to be made well?’ Like it or not, asking God for solutions often means new challenges. A child might solve his need for pocket money by delivering newspapers, but when he grows up, hopefully he’ll be solving bigger ones, like how to provide for his family. But the good news is, solving bigger problems brings bigger rewards. So ask God to stretch you today by helping you ‘take up your bed and walk’ (John 5:8 NKJV), burn your bridges of dependency and ‘learned helplessness,’ and move on to greater things. In other words, ‘choose to live!’