8 minute read
The story of the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment feels very real to me in this season of my life. She had an issue of blood for twelve years. I have an issue of blood. Scripture says she spent everything she had searching for answers, yet no one could heal her. I feel as though I, too, have spent myself searching for answers, with no one able to help. I understand her desperation.
No one else in that crowd is described as pressing through in the way she did—through broken people, disciples, religious elites—just to lay hold of the One thing she believed she needed. But she did. That is telling. It should tell us something about how unbearable it can be to live with chronic bleeding and the suffering surrounding menstruation, which I assume was part of her condition. Something created by God to signify life had, for her, become an experience marked by weakness, loss, and desperation.
She reached a point where she would rather risk condemnation—whether from religious zealots or even God Himself—than continue suffering as she had been. She was willing to take that risk. The woman who had been taught that no one looks upon the face of God and lives still chose to reach out and touch Him.
Someone who has been bleeding for twelve years is not whole. I can tell you that.
And it says something profound about what continual bleeding does to a person—to have your body interrupt your life over and over is exhausting and discouraging, but it is far more than this. Scripture tells us long before science that life is in the blood. When we lose enough of it, we die. When we lose some of it, we suffer.
There is dehydration. Irregular heartbeat. Brain fog and memory disarray. Dizziness that leaves you unsteady on your feet. Then the isolation: separation from intimacy, from religious life, from ordinary ease among other people. In her culture, menstruation made a woman ceremonially unclean. She was likely judged harshly for a condition she could not control. Alone. Exhausted. Sick. Unstable on her feet. Science now confirms what women have always known: without enough blood, the body slowly begins to shut down.
Now we live in an age of ultrasounds, scopes and tiny cameras, surgeries and medications. So I find myself asking questions about that woman. Did she perhaps have a fibroid? Undiagnosed endometriosis? Some condition we could identify and even operate on today?
Maybe the deeper truth is that regardless of the cause, she was still not whole until Jesus touched her life.
And would it be fair for any of us to make simple judgments about suffering, knowing what we know now? We understand today that exposure in the womb to infection or environmental toxins can disrupt reproductive development and cause lifelong problems later on. Is that the infant’s fault?
My own story with bleeding began early. I was twelve , in history class when I first got my period. I remember the purple plaid pants. The warm wetness liquid in my underwear. The shock of bleeding through. The humiliation of not understanding how to manage it. Not wanting to make a fuss. Pretending nothing happened. Walking off the bus wondering if everyone could somehow see what I felt. I went home and threw the clothes away.
I assumed this was simply what womanhood was and I had arrived.
In high school my periods became painful, sending me home sick. Then came years blurred by ordinary life. My periods were never consistent. They were irregular, usually late, always making me wonder if I was pregnant. Yet I also remember wonderful pregnancies, children, and many years where bleeding did not define my life.
Then midlife found me, or I found it, something changed.
The bleeding became heavier. More painful. More consuming. Instead of back pain and a few difficult days, I began needing heavy medication, days of rest, endless pads. I kept trying to push through, nothing to see here, like that 12 year old girl pretending everything was fine I would just endure. Now, at forty-eight, nearly ten years later, it has become consistently worse. I bleed unpredictably, gushing through like that first menarche—sometimes every two weeks. There is tissue loss, exhaustion, discouragement, depression, iron supplements, rapid heartbeat and I feel enslaved by it and a slave to it, as though my body dictates the boundaries of my life.
There are pads and tampons in every purse, pocket, and bag I own so I am never caught off guard. I bring extra clothes with me everywhere. I often feel I miss out on things, or suffer through what should be joyful moments. I feel like my scarlet letter is a scarlett punctuation mark.
I have gone to countless doctors. Modern medicine has found some explanations—endometriosis, a vascular fibroid, anemia, dehydration—but outside of surgery and synthetic medications, nothing has truly stopped the bleeding. So I find myself identifying deeply with that woman in Scripture. at least I can get a hysterectomy, but then again, I understand what it feels like to not feel whole and moreover to have to not be whole in order to be healed, its a strange concept. I understand the desperation of wanting someone—anyone—to fix me, I’m tired. Rather than add loss to loss. Jesus offers something entirely different.
If Jesus felt virtue leave Him, what exactly was transferred to this woman?
Was it merely physical healing, or was it something deeper she needed? Virtue means moral excellence—courage, wisdom, temperance, patience, justice. A disposition toward goodness and flourishing. Was she lacking these things? Am I?
I wonder sometimes if suffering exposes incompleteness in the soul as much as weakness in the body.
What does it mean to touch Jesus now, when I cannot physically stand in the crowd and reach for His garment? What does healing look like for me? Is surgery part of that healing? Is medicine? Or are they only more physicians like the ones the woman spent her life searching through?
When Jesus healed people, He gave from Himself without diminishing Himself. Jesus didn’t just heal people because he was powerful and God, he took from his own and gave it to others. He filled what was empty. He restored what was broken with his flesh and blood. In a way, He became the first blood donor—giving His own life so others might live.
I had a dream the other night. Someone handed me something wrapped loosely in cloth. I opened it and found a human heart. A real heart—pink, healthy, whole, with veins and muscle and valves. I was thrilled by it. “Oh,” I said, “it’s a heart.” I turned it over in my hands, marveling at it. Then someone else came and tore a large piece from the top of it the way a child tears apart play-dough.
Maybe that is the point of everything—that we, broken in whatever way we are broken, reach out, and Jesus allows us to take from Him. His blood makes us whole.
And then we are marked, not by our own losses and degeneration, but by His power and virtue.
We will spend our lives, our strength, and our resources trying to make ourselves whole, but there are limits to what we can do on our own. We cannot ultimately stop the bleeding, restore life, or reverse the signs of decay without the Great Physician.
And yet there is something I can do, and will do, through surgery. Maybe that has become the hem of His garment for me in this season—a step toward help and healing.
It will not make me whole in the way Jesus can. It will change me. It will remove something that feels deeply tied to being a woman. This season is all about loss and change and one of the loudest lessons I’m learning right now , is loss and change is okay. I would far rather be marked by the Blood of Christ, than my own.
My Faith Place 