Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
The bleeding had stopped. The woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve years felt in her body, we are told in Mark 5, that she was healed. She could have gone on her way, 
anonymously. There was a crowd; the others needn’t have known how she was healed, or even that she was healed.
But would she have been cured?
Psychology Today tells us healing is “becoming whole” while curing means “eliminating all evidence of disease.” The woman’s story so beautifully illustrates the difference. Just touching his clothes made her whole. She could tell, in the way we all can when a bone finally heals or we’re finally over the flu or a cold or a sinus infection. We’re whole again.
But when the woman knew Jesus was looking for her, she became clean in a different way. You might say she went to confession. She shared her story, about how she had suffered and secretly touched him in hopes of the hemorrhages ending once and for all, and knew she had been healed physically. Maybe she was afraid she’d get in trouble. Maybe she was afraid she’d be mocked.
But still, when she summoned up the courage and faith to testify as to what happened, Jesus cured her of all those other concerns that separated her from her community and God during those years, of her shame and her self-disgust and her feeling she would never be “normal” again and perhaps a sense that God was “punishing” her. But when she was cured, the inner darkness was gone. She was whole again in every way, freed of more than the bleeding. She was cured… as we can be when we go to the Lord and ask for the gift of a clean and upright spirit, the gift only He can give.
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