The Bleeding Woman Who Needed Belonging

Jesus always wants to bring more healing than we’re asking for.

He didn’t call her “woman,” but “daughter”—an intensely personal term of endearment, a term that conferred dignity and belonging on her, that implied family and community.
— Stephen Seamands, "Follow the Healer"

Jesus wanted more for her.

Jesus wasn’t satisfied with healing her chronic bleeding alone, though that was part of the plan: He wanted to heal the terrain in which the disease emerged.

Every disease has a causal terrain, or context (1). For example: systemic dysfunction in the body, emotional wounding, trauma, relational loss, and mental perspective. All shape the development and growth (or inhibition) of disease. As Ken Blue, author of Authority to Heal suggests, “A human being is a kind of ecosystem, a complex and interdependent whole. Pollution in one part contaminates all, and dealing with the pollution at its source heals all.” (Note: “pollution” does not have to imply “sin.”)

Shame, isolation, and dis-favoring likely perpetuated the bleeding woman’s continued hemorrhaging. The woman’s unchecked and messy blood flow was a red warning to others: “I am unsafe.” Why, because disease is in the blood; and blood that smears surfaces makes it communicable.

Her blood blocked her belonging.

My own chronic hemorrhaging

When cancer recurred in my own body, I sensed God saying, “Jim, I want to heal more than your cancer: I want you to be disease-resistant.” The cancer left, but the conditions that gave rise to it remained: severe inflammation left behind a chronic flow of blood and and bundles of nerves set afire. So I don’t merely want to get my old body back; I want a body flowing with resilient resistance to disease.

What he Gave Back to her

As Jesus did for the woman, he will do for me: heal the conditions that inflamed the disease in the first place. For the woman, he gave her back belonging. For me, the means for re-entry are multifold—getting my life back will mean healing the terrain, sector by sector; all of which Jesus (and I) will carefully attend to. He always wants more healing than I’m asking for.

(1) Dr. Nasha Winters introduced the idea of Terrain Theory in the healing and prevention of cancer.