Daily Devotionals

There is a particular sting in being known only by your worst reputation. People say your name and a story follows it, and after a while you begin to introduce yourself that way too. It can feel easier to hide than to be known again.

Years ago a man at a workplace made one costly mistake and was talked about for months afterward. He told me the hardest part was walking into the break room, because conversations changed when he entered. What undid him, in a good way, was a colleague who used his name warmly and asked about his weekend, as if nothing else defined him.

Zacchaeus is a short man up a tree, well known and well disliked. He is curious enough to climb, but he expects to watch from a distance. Jesus stops under the branch, looks up, and calls him by name. Not a lecture about the past. A name, and an invitation: I must stay at your house today.

Whatever label has followed you, it is not what he says when he looks up at you. He knows the whole story and still wants to come in. You can come down from wherever you have been watching life from a safe height. Answer to your name, and let him come under your roof. That kind of welcome changes people, as it changed him.

Many of us put off going to the doctor until we feel better. It sounds absurd, but we do the same with God. We wait until we have calmed down, sorted ourselves out, and stopped repeating the same mistakes before we dare to come near. It is a very human kind of pride, and it keeps many of us waiting outside a door that is already open.

A neighbour who works at a small clinic's front desk told me that the people who worry her most are the ones who say they will come in once things settle down. They rarely do. The ones who walk in with the mess still on them are the ones who get helped.

When Jesus is criticised for sitting with people the respectable crowd avoided, his answer is gentle and almost humorous. A doctor belongs among the sick. That is the whole point of a doctor. He is not embarrassed by your condition. He came for it. He does not ask whether you have recovered yet.

So come as you are today, with the tired heart, the habit you cannot break, the question you are ashamed to ask. You do not need to be well before you are welcome. Bringing the need is the very thing that lets him do his work. Walk in with the mess still on you. Honesty is all the entry fee there is.

Crowded rooms can be the loneliest places. Everyone is moving, talking, brushing past, and you feel like a ghost among them, wanting to be noticed but afraid of being a bother. That quiet ache of being passed over is more common than people admit, and it is rarely spoken about.

A woman in our community told me she once stood at the back of a large gathering for an hour, hoping somebody would speak to her. When nobody did, she went home and decided she was invisible. The next day a quiet person she barely knew phoned just to ask whether she was all right.

In Luke, a woman who has been unwell for twelve years slips through a crowd to touch the edge of Jesus' cloak. She hopes to disappear again afterward. But Jesus stops and asks who touched him. Not to shame her. He wants to look at her. He wants her to know she was not only healed but seen, and he calls her daughter.

You may have spent a long time hoping to be helped without being noticed. Today, consider that you are already noticed. The one who feels every desperate touch of faith in a busy day is not annoyed by you. He turns around, he looks for you, and he is glad to find you. Nothing about your small, shaking faith is too small for him.

Think of the last time you were stuck and truly needed help. The car would not start, the news came at a bad hour, the plan fell apart. In that moment you did not need a lecture. You needed someone to stop. Maybe you are in that place now, or you remember it clearly, the relief of one steady person arriving.

Someone who once sat stranded at the roadside after dark told me that dozens of cars drove past. Then one slowed down, and a stranger stepped out, looked at the situation, and said, "Let's get you home." She has never forgotten that sentence, because it asked nothing of her and carried everything. It still warms her years later.

The traveller in Jesus' story is beaten and left behind, and the respectable people cross to the other side. The one who stops is the one nobody expected. He kneels, cleans the wounds, lifts the man onto his own animal, and pays for his recovery. It is a picture of mercy that gets its hands dirty.

That is how God comes to you. He does not pass by your trouble at a safe distance. He kneels beside it and tends it. And having been carried, you begin to stop for others, perhaps today, for someone close by whose trouble you almost walked past. Mercy received has a way of becoming mercy given.