It’s not a long walk from my house to where they say the Teacher is speaking. I’ve made it a thousand times, but today it seems to stretch halfway to eternity.
Every step is heavy. Every breath comes hard to my lungs, which seem especially brittle. I have to pause and put a hand on the wall as the weight of what I’m doing makes me stagger.
They say he's healing people. The gossip has flamed across the city for days -- but it is no longer just gossip, some of my friends have seen it for themselves. All evening they came, one after another, urging me to go to him.
The same friends who have carried me through this long illness, this endless, barren desert.
Sarah stayed with me over and over in the first years when I couldn’t get out of bed for the pain. Hannah brought me a new bauble, each made by her own hands, in those years when the darkness threatened to consume me. Rachel moved me into her home for six months when Matthew finally left me.
And all of them were there that morning after I despaired of life itself and tried to end it.
They have prayed with me, gone with me to make sacrifices, even walked beside me a few times to visit far-flung healers. The long walk home was always worse; their chatter louder, brighter, more offensive.
They wanted to come with me this morning, but I told them it was something I needed to do alone. I couldn’t bear to walk home with them again, even one more time, if it turns out not to be true.
There have been a lot of dark nights in the twelve years since I first became sick. More than I can count or care to remember. Nights of pleading, of weeping, of bargaining. But this night I have just passed was the darkest of all. Endless. Excruciating.
The arrows from my friends pierced the hardened soil of my soul, making the tiniest sliver of room, which is all that was needed for the first shoots to burst through. I expended all my effort trying to suppress it, then watched in agony as it rebirthed itself against my will, centimeter by centimeter, the tiny green sprigs like daggers.
Hope. That bitterest of poisons.
Just go see him. What could it hurt to try?
The well-meaning words of encouragement from my friends echo in the passageway as I stumble forward again.
What could it hurt? A lot.
Hope is deadly. Toxic.
I have beggared myself hoping doctors could fix me. Humiliated myself hoping my husband would return. Wept myself dry of tears years ago hoping God would intervene.
Who do I have to hope in anyway? This God who created the heavens and the earth? This God who is able to heal me and has deliberately chosen not to?
I obey him. I serve him. And if I no longer love him with the passion of my youth, well, obedience is what the law requires, not love. I don’t need love to survive, just like I don’t need hope.
Hope is for children.
But they are my friends and I can’t survive without them, so I take another slow step forward.
I should be able to hear the sounds of the crowd by now, but it is dead silent when I come around the corner. The normally-thriving market is still as a painting, every person stopped in their tracks, focused entirely on the man.
What could it hurt to try?
It could hurt a lot.
It could be the very end of me.