“He said to them, ‘Do you still not understand?’”

As Mark tells the story, this response of Jesus comes at the end of a three-part story.

In the first part, Jesus has a conversation with his disciples about feeding the crowd of about 4000 people that has been with them for three days. And then Jesus feeds them. And then sails away.

In the second part, a group of religious leaders finds Jesus and asks him for a sign from heaven. Instead, they get a sigh and a refusal. And Jesus and the disciples get back in the boat.

In the third part, the disciples as talking as they cross the water and realize that they only have one loaf of bread for the 13 of them. Asks them a series of questions that ends with “Do you still not understand?”

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Four years ago, I started writing through the gospel of Mark, a post at a time. (Mark in 2022) We started in January and ended abruptly in May 2022. There was one more post in December that year and a reference to the series in 2024.

Last week, I went back to those posts to see whether that might be a place to restart my reading and writing. And I went back to my calendar to understand what happened.

May 2022 was interesting. At the hospital, January had our second highest number of deaths ever, exceeded only by January 2021. In our family, our grandson Ben was born in January, 2022. I was working on a couple research projects, had a funeral, was starting to pick up some extra shifts.

I see now that I didn’t have, or didn’t create, much time for reflection. It’s possible that reflection on these stories may have helped.

It’s time to make that space.