Learning to Live There

“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live…”
John 11:25

Muscle memory is useful because it lets us do familiar things without thinking through every movement. Life can work that way too. We learn how to provide, lead, care for people, solve problems, carry responsibility, even how to be faithful through pressures we have met before. Then something changes and the old movements no longer quite fit. Work ends. Our strength has different limits. A role shifts, someone is missing, or an opportunity asks something of us we have never had to face before. We can be experienced and strangely inexperienced at the same time. What if that unfamiliarity is not evidence that the life behind us prepared us poorly, but simply the first sign that what comes next cannot be lived entirely from what we already know?

Martha already knew what it was to trust Jesus before the day her brother died. She and her sister Mary were close friends of His, and when their brother Lazarus became seriously ill, they sent word to Jesus. By the time He arrived, Lazarus had died, and Martha went out to meet Him carrying both grief and a faith she had already lived with for some time. “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (John 11:24), she tells Him. Jesus answers, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). The future Martha already believes in has not disappeared, but somehow the conversation has become larger than the answer she brought to it.

Centuries before Martha stood at Lazarus’s tomb, Isaiah described a future that could have sounded unrealistic to anyone measuring possibility by the world in front of them. “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom” (Isaiah 35:1). A few lines later, “Then will the lame leap like a deer,” and “water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert” (Isaiah 35:6). Our own lives tell us that not every loss is restored and not every limitation disappears in this life. But what have we already decided will never move? Later, when Jesus stands before Lazarus’s sealed tomb, He says simply, “Take away the stone” (John 11:39).

Earlier, Martha had told Jesus, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God...” (John 11:27). Yet when He says, “Take away the stone,” she hesitates. “By this time there is a bad odor,” she answers (John 11:39). Martha’s faith is real, but so is her reluctance. We may recognize that hesitation, when we know the next step but not what will happen after we take it. Jesus answers, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” (John 11:40). Maybe a reality we never thought we could inhabit begins to open before us one act of imperfect trust at a time. “So they took away the stone” (John 11:41).

“The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen...” (John 11:44). Lazarus is alive, yet he still has to learn how to move in a reality no one expected him to inhabit. Maybe it is like the first few mornings in a new house, when our hand still reaches for the light switch that was on the old wall. A new possibility can already be real before it feels natural. Jesus says, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go” (John 11:44). What if there is more of Jesus ahead than the life we knew had ever given us reason to discover?

Prayer

Jesus, when the path ahead is unclear, keep me close. Give me courage for the next step, and keep my heart open to what You are revealing along the way. Amen.