The important and the broken
Some of us approach God with demands written in the lines of our faces, authority clutched like a scepter in our hands. Others creep toward heaven on their bellies, convinced they deserve nothing but shadows. Yet in the dust between entitlement and shame, between commanding and cowering, something extraordinary waits to unfold.
This is a story for those who feel too important to kneel and those who feel too broken to stand. For the part of you that storms into prayer with a list of what God owes you, and the part that whispers apologies for taking up space in the universe. For Jairus lives in all of us—the synagogue ruler who expects his righteousness to purchase miracles—and so does Berenike, the woman whose bleeding has taught her to make herself invisible.
The Drama Ahead
What you’re about to witness is collision. Two desperate people, one dying child, and a moment when the most anticipated miracle of the day gets interrupted by someone who wasn’t supposed to matter. The bleeding woman’s forbidden touch will contaminate everything—or so it seems. The law that Jairus has devoted his life to upholding will become the very barrier between his daughter and life itself.
This isn’t a neat story where everyone gets what they want in the order they expect. This is the messy, devastating, beautiful reality of how God works: through interruptions, through the “wrong” people touching at the “wrong” time, through what appears to be the complete destruction of hope itself.
The drama lies not just in whether a child will live or die, but in how ritual purity laws—the very foundations of religious order—will crumble and be rebuilt in a single afternoon. How a woman’s desperate reach for healing will seem to steal another’s miracle. How bleeding will become blessing, but not without first appearing to be curse.
The Woman With Two Names
Church tradition has long identified the woman with the issue of blood as Berenike (Veronica in Latin), she who would later offer Jesus a cloth to wipe his bleeding face on the road to Calvary. The woman who knew what it meant to bleed uncontrollably would one day tend to his sacred wounds. The one whose own hemorrhaging made her ritually unclean would cleanse the face of the dying God.
Whether this connection springs from historical fact or the church’s beautiful instinct for symmetry matters less than its profound truth: the same hands that once reached desperately for healing would later reach out in service. The woman who received compassion would become its embodiment. Her story doesn’t end with her own restoration—it flows forward into a lifetime of tending others’ wounds.
This tradition reminds us that every healing we receive is meant to overflow, every grace we’re given becomes grace we’re equipped to give.
Two Sides of One Coin
Jairus and Berenike are not opposites—they are two faces of the same human condition. In Jairus, we see our entitled self, the part that has followed the rules and expects God to follow them too. In Berenike, we recognize our shame-soaked self, the part that has learned to expect nothing and ask for less.
But watch what happens when these two meet in the dust around Jesus’ feet. Watch how the powerful man’s authority dissolves into desperate pleading, and how the invisible woman steps into the light to tell her truth. Watch how their collision creates not destruction but the space for an even greater miracle than either dared imagine.
Over the next seven days, you’ll feel your own knees buckle and your own hand reach out. You’ll discover the places where you demand and the places where you hide. You’ll learn that God’s grace is too wild to be contained by our categories of worthy and unworthy, too generous to be rationed according to our understanding of who deserves what.
How to Journey
Each day contains a story that will live in your body as much as your mind. Let yourself feel the dust under Jairus’ knees, the tremor in Berenike’s fingers, the weight of expectation and the lightness of surprise. The spiritual exercises invite you not just to think about these characters but to inhabit their experience, to discover where their struggles live in your own flesh.
This is embodied scripture—not just words on a page but a drama unfolding in the theater of your own heart, your own desperate places, your own encounters with the One who touches what shouldn’t be touched and heals what can’t be healed.
Come, then. Come with your demands and your apologies, your authority and your shame. Come and watch bleeding become blessing, watch power become surrender, watch the interruption become the very heart of the miracle.
Come and discover that in God’s economy, nothing—not status, not suffering, not even sacred law itself—matters more than the reach of desperate faith toward unfathomable love.
“And a woman who had suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.'” – Matthew 9:20-21
“Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly…” – Mark 5:22-23
When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. – Luke 8:43