Topic: Soul Care Basics — Key Scripture: John 5:1-9
There’s a question in John 5 that sounds almost cruel until you sit with it long enough to feel its weight.
Jesus is at the pool of Bethesda, surrounded by people waiting for healing — the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. He walks up to one man in particular, someone who has been there for thirty-eight years, and asks him something that seems, on the surface, absurd: “Do you want to be healed?”
Of course he wants to be healed. He’s been lying by that pool for nearly four decades. Who would ask that?
But look at his answer. He doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t say no. He explains why it hasn’t happened — no one to help him into the water, someone always getting there first. It’s an answer full of reasons, but strikingly absent of an actual yes.
I’ve sat with enough people over the years — in counseling sessions, hospital rooms, and quiet conversations after church — to recognize that answer. It’s not evasive because the person is dishonest. It’s evasive because healing is genuinely more complicated than it looks from the outside.
Thirty-eight years is a long time to build a life around an identity. The man at the pool wasn’t just sick — he had, by necessity, organized his entire existence around being the man who couldn’t walk. His routines, his location, probably his relationships, all revolved around his condition. Healing wasn’t only a physical question. It was an existential one: who am I, and what is expected of me, if this thing that has defined me for decades is suddenly gone?
That’s the part of this story I think we skip past too quickly. We assume healing is simply good news received gladly. But healing comes with its own kind of fear — the fear of expectation. If you’re no longer the person who’s struggling, people may expect you to function differently, contribute differently, show up differently. Soul care, real soul care, often asks something of us on the other side of it. And that unknown can be more frightening than the pain we already know how to carry.
I’ve watched this play out in ministry more times than I can count. People come seeking help, and some part of them genuinely wants relief — but another part quietly resists it, because change means stepping into a version of themselves they’ve never had to be. Staying stuck, as painful as it is, is at least familiar. Healing is not.
I’ve felt this myself, in seasons of ministry exhaustion so long-standing that a kind of identity had formed around the exhaustion itself. When someone would ask me how I am, or how things were going, the response just became “busy” — guessing I’m probably not the only one. Even when I finally stopped, that answer kept coming — even in the moments I had nothing scheduled — and when I would hear it, I knew I wasn’t well. But getting well was really complicated. It would mean facing questions I’d avoided for years — what do I actually want, who am I outside of constant service to others, what happens if I stop running on empty and have to sit with what’s actually there.
Jesus doesn’t shame the man at the pool for his answer. He doesn’t lecture him about excuses. He simply says, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” The healing comes not because the man finally said the right words, but because Jesus was willing to act in the middle of his hesitation, his fear, his half-answer.
That’s what soul care actually looks like at its best — not waiting until someone has fully resolved their fear of the unknown before offering help, but meeting people honestly in their hesitation and walking with them toward wholeness anyway.
If you’ve been circling the question of whether to pursue healing — for a wound, a burnout, a grief, a pattern you’ve carried for years — I don’t think the goal is to arrive at a clean, confident “yes” before you start. The man at the pool didn’t have one either. He had thirty-eight years of reasons why not yet. And Jesus met him there.
Choosing soul care rarely feels like triumphant certainty. More often, it feels like showing up honestly with your hesitation still intact, and letting someone walk with you anyway. That’s not weakness. That’s the actual starting point for almost everyone who has ever gotten well.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.