It takes less time to read things than it took to live them.

For example, “As soon as they got out of the boat, people recognized Jesus. They ran throughout that whole region and carried the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went-into villages, towns, or countryside-they place the sick in the marketplaces.”

It takes 15 seconds to read. It took days or weeks or months to live. Which meant that there were dozens of meals, dozens of conversations that people had with Jesu that didn’t involve healing. Dozens of uneventful (for us) hours of the disciples (and others) walking around with Jesus.

That time was the norm. The time between the big events, the life with, was the norm.

I mean, not that it was like the life they had while fishing, but they didn’t spend every moment worrying about what he wasn’t doing. They were with him. And sometimes they forgot his power and they were with him.

Which is why, sometimes, we read about how they forgot he could feed thousands or stop storms. I don’t think they were failures for not remembering. They were learners. And so are you.

I hear so many of us self-condemning for not praying enough or not being good enough or not reading the Bible every day.

And I hear resolutions to do better.

Never in those conversations does a person say, “So I asked Jesus about it. And he laughed. He said I was a lot like Philip who was approachable or Andrew who greeted people or John and James who were so loud and tempestuous that he called them ‘sons of thunder’. And then he said, ‘but I didn’t fire them. I loved them.’ and then he said, ‘I know how you are, too. And I love you, too.’ And then he said, ‘let’s go for a walk.”

Mark in 2022