Every Second Counted, But Jesus Wasn't Counting
Adapted from the Story of Jairus and His Test of Faith
Adapted from Matthew 9:18-26, Mark 5:21-43, and Luke 8:40-56.
Jairus, Archisynagogos of Capernaum, Ruler of the Synagogue.
A man could get drunk on a title like that, and I did. Granting or denying access to the courts. Representing the congregation to outside authorities. Ordering or stopping floggings. Excommunicating. That kind of power feels invigorating to a mere man.
Until his daughter is dying.
I knew the Scriptures. I stood in the synagogue week after week, overseeing the reading of the Law, making sure everything was in order. I knew where people sat, who carried influence, who needed correction. I was respected. Deferred to.
When I spoke, people listened.
There’s a certain rhythm to that kind of life. You begin to believe you can manage things. That if you just stay faithful, stay sharp, stay disciplined, you can keep the world from unraveling.
But death doesn’t respect your position.
Her decline started small. A fever. Nothing alarming at first. We had seen it before. Children get sick, and they recover quickly. Every parent knows that and expects it. My wife tried to stay calm, but I could see it in her eyes before she said it out loud. This time it was different.
The fever lingered, and it climbed. Then it consumed until it grew out of control. All my authority, all my clout and power, all my strategically built reputation meant nothing in that small room where my daughter lay burning and fading away right before my haughty eyes.
I remember standing there, watching her chest rise and fall, uneven and shallow. I remember thinking, “I oversee the synagogue. I am one of the most powerful men in town, and I cannot help my own child breathe. I can’t command her body to do what it is supposed to do without thinking.” That’s when control started slipping through my fingers.
At first, I did what any man in my position would do. I sought out help within my circles. I have the ear of EVERYONE who can bring answers for ANY problem. The best doctors and healers. But the more I reached, the more I realized that I was grasping at air.
There’s a moment every man faces, no matter how much we try to avoid it. The moment when you realize your strength has a ceiling, that your influence has limits, and that your authority means nothing to the uncontrollable circumstances of life. I faced that moment standing beside her bed that morning.
Helpless.
Clueless.
Powerless.
And then there were whispers about Him. I had heard them before, of course. Everyone had. Stories of healings. Of authority that didn’t come from training or position. Some of us were cautious. Some skeptical. A few outright opposed. You don’t build a system of order and then easily embrace someone who disrupts it. But desperation has a way of cutting through your defense mechanisms.
When your daughter is dying, you stop debating. YOU ACT. Even if it is contrary to everything you built for yourself. I didn’t announce my decision. I didn’t gather a council. I didn’t ask permission.
I LEFT TO FIND HIM!
I remember the walk, or was it a run? I was out of my mind. It felt longer than it should have. Every step carried the weight of what I was risking. Not just my reputation, though that was certainly on the line. It was more than that. It was everything I had built my identity on. Independence. Capability. Self-reliance. The confidence of knowing I could make things right.
How would I approach Him? If I went to this wandering teacher, this disruptor of order, and begged, then I was admitting something. That I wasn’t enough. That everything I had relied on wasn’t enough now.
I found Him in the crowd. Of course, there was a crowd. There’s always a crowd when hope shows up in a place that’s been suffocating under oppression and tyranny.
As I approached Him, I didn’t even think about it, as a matter of fact, I did the unthinkable. I fell down before Him. Right in front of the crowd. Not as a leader or a man of status. Just as a desperate father trying to seek help for an unsolvable problem with his precious little girl.
“My little daughter is dying. Please come. Put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.”
On my knees at His feet, I didn’t dress it up. No formal language. No theological framing. No leaning into my authority. Just raw, unadulterated desperation. And He said yes. That should have been enough. That should have settled everything in me. He was coming. But if you’ve ever walked through a crisis, you know, faith doesn’t always feel like confidence. Sometimes it feels like holding onto a thread while everything inside you is scratching for hope and finding doubt.
We started moving toward my house. His eyes turned in the direction of my daughter’s sick bed. He heard my cry! He joined my pursuit to save my little girl.
And then He stopped and turned his head to look down behind Himself.
“Wait. Please. Don’t Stop. Let’s keep moving.” My words were respectful, but my gut was wrenching and screaming to take control.
He looked back at a lady I had seen lingering outside the Synagogue walls many times. An unclean beggar is not allowed into the presence of the religious. A woman who had been an outcast for years due to her chronic pathological bleeding. She was prohibited from entering the worship and synagogue life. She was perpetually unclean, and no one would touch her in order to protect themselves.
Here she was, a socially and religiously rejected outcast. And my daughter, the daughter of the Ruler of the Synagogue, lie at home in her deathbed waiting for the Healer. And he was taking time for the vagabond! How could this be? How could this happen to a man of my stature? At the point of my greatest desperation.
On the inside, the father in me raged for control. But standing before the only hope for my daughter’s life, I was forced to silence as I watched Him divert his attention to this hopeless beggar. How could He do this to me? Didn’t He know who I was?
She had touched Him, and He turned to find her. He asked questions. He listened. He spoke to her as precious seconds passed and my daughter’s life grew more fragile and fleeting.
Didn’t He know that EVERY second mattered? Didn’t He realize that this woman had been bleeding for 12 years? It could wait one more day! Just one more day, while He hurried to save my daughter’s life! I wanted to grab Him. To say, “Please! You don’t understand! She doesn’t have years as this woman did. She has minutes!”
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t risk losing Him. So, I watched.
And something strange happened in that pause. As frustrating as it was, as unbearable as it felt, I saw something in Him. He wasn’t rushed. He wasn’t anxious. He was fully present with her.
As I stood watching, I heard a commotion from behind me. The voices became more familiar as they moved closer.
“Step aside, I’m getting to the ruler of the Synagogue. Move to the side. We have an urgent message.”
“Sir, leave Him be, your daughter is dead.”
Even in the midst of the shouting crowds and the weeping woman, my world became dead silent. The kind of hush that only comes with news like that. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of hope. Everything inside me collapsed in that moment.
It was over. He was too late. My one hope for a miracle was wasted on a beggar! He turned to me. Not to the crowd. Not to the messengers. To me.
“Don’t be afraid. Just believe.” His voice was some mixture of tenderness and confidence.
“Believe what? She’s gone.” I thought. “You cold-hearted healer.”
But there was something in His voice that softened me. It wasn’t urgency. Not panic, but authority. A kind of steady certainty that didn’t match the situation, but overshadowed it.
I turned toward home and started walking. One hundred paces, and for some reason, I looked back. Maybe to say one last goodbye to my daughter’s last chance for life. And when my eyes met His, I realized He was following me. Why? It was too late. Is he mocking me?
When we arrived, the house was already filled with mourning. The wailing had begun. Professional mourners, neighbors, and family. Everyone was doing what we do when death comes. Making noise around the silence. As the mourners and the family came running to see Him, He said something that made my blood boil all over again.
“She is not dead, but asleep.”
They laughed at Him. Of course they did. We always laugh when the situation is beyond belief. We laugh to relieve the tension of being confronted with something too good to be true.
Why would He put me through the agony of insisting on going to her room to see her? Why would He make this harder? Why would he pierce me with having to see Him standing over her body when He could have treated this with more urgency when I fell at His feet two hours ago?
He asked everyone else to leave. And then it was just us. Me. My wife. A few of His closest followers and Him.
And her.
Lying there.
Silent and Still. LIFELESS!
He took her by the hand. Such a simple act. Such a gentle gesture. No performance. No ritual. Just a comforting touch.
“Talitha koum. Little girl, I say to you, get up.”
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen next. I really had no framework for seeing her breathe in life after the last breath had left her lungs. I really don’t know what I thought was coming. But what I saw was nowhere in my realm of possibility.
Her chest rose. She gasped. She heaved as she inhaled deeply. And her eyes opened!
She rose from a posture of death to sit in a posture of life. Everything I thought I knew about power, about authority, about control shattered in that moment. The most powerful man on the planet cannot command life into a dead body. This was something far from the natural system by which we rule.
Her mother screamed. Then she fell into her daughter’s arms and wailed. Tears of rejoicing began to fall from my eyes for the first time in decades. What we saw Him do was more than I could have ever asked or imagined just a few minutes earlier. Life itself bent to His voice. And somehow it didn’t just flow back into our daughter, it spilled out into the hearts of her parents in a way that I can not put into words.
As I reflect back on that day twenty years back, I feel like it was just a day ago. The life that He breathed into her still flows through my lungs. Things are different now. Power and influence have new definitions. Life and death look different. I have surrendered my existence and purpose to His glory and honor.
And through this whole experience of life and death and life again, there’s something that still grips me as I’m lying in bed at night thinking about what I saw that day.
He wasn’t in a hurry. Even with death on the line, He wasn’t rushed. Because what feels final to us isn’t final to Him. An interruption by a bleeding beggar on the road doesn’t have to wait to defer to a situation that was literally life or death. I thought I needed Him to move faster. But what I actually needed was to trust Him more deeply.
Most of us are still trying to control outcomes. Manage timelines. Protect what matters most to us with whatever authority we think we have. But sooner or later, you’ll face something that strips all that away. And in that moment, you’ll have a choice.
Cling to what you can control? Or fall at the feet of our savior and trust what you can’t? I’ve done both. I’ve tried to power my way through problems and solutions, relying on my ingenuity and skill. And I’ve failed in the face of the uncontrollable. And I’ve come to the end of my influence and power and been forced to fall before the feet of Jesus in humility, risking my reputation and relinquishing my control.
And I will tell you without reserve that, either way, you will fall hard and be forced to trust deeply. So do yourself a favor and fall into His arms as my wife fell into our daughter’s. And let your self-sufficiency and willpower drain from your head to your toes and out of your existence and lean deeply into the One, the only One who has the authority to conquer death and breathe life into a lifeless soul.
When He seems distracted by the beggar and slow to embrace the urgency of your situation, give Him the freedom to take the situation into His own hands. Grieve, but don’t lose hope. Question, but don’t doubt. Walk toward Him and not away.
Right now. This very moment. As you read this last paragraph. What is it you are holding on to? Where is your life out of control? What are you waiting on, and what seems to be distracting Him from running with you?
He knows. And He cares.
Trust Him With the Delay.
Beautiful. You are so good at introspection.