Details, details

A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. Matt. 8:2, 3 (NIV)

As part of my quiet time each morning, I read the day's devotional from the publication, The Upper Room. The Upper Room always has some kind of picture on the cover and the picture for this month is a reproduction of a painting of Jesus healing a leper. Jesus is bending down holding the leper's hand and there are people watching in the background and so on. It is a very interesting picture, but this morning something about that picture caught my eye that I hadn't noticed before. Near the leper is a dog. This dog is lying in the dirt and is nothing but skin and bone. As soon as I noticed this dog, I started studying the picture a little more closely to see what else I had missed. I noticed that the leper is sitting in a pile of rags. Behind him, it looks like he has a makeshift shelter built from a couple of sticks. His foot is all bandaged and he's sitting under a scraggly tree which gives him very little, if any, shade. Nothing about him is very clean or nice, but he and the skinny dog are sitting there looking up at Jesus.

As I studied the picture again, I was reminded of how often my reading of Bible stories just really skims the top of what is really happening. I do not visualize all the life going on behind the words I am reading. The authors of the Bible wrote in such a way as to make a point about who God is and how He works in the lives of His people and they quite often did not go into as much detail as I would sometimes like. My mind is used to televised versions of stories which leave nothing to the imagination or paragraphs upon paragraphs of elaborate descriptions of background from the novels I sometimes like to read. It was not the style of the time for biblical story writers to go into how hot the sun was or how thin the people were or to tell about the soft breeze that brushed their faces, but those details were there in the actual event. Quite often I am left to figure out some of these details from historical finds, from hints in the text, or even from my own understanding of human nature. Seeing this painting helped me to fill in some of the details of what this scene may have actually been like.

The detail that struck me most from this picture is that this man and this dog were starving, dirty, and scorned. They lived with absolutely nothing of value, and this type of situation is probably what Jesus saw everyday. He saw people who had nothing of physical value, but even worse, he saw those who had nothing of spiritual value. I often miss those hints about details that the Bible drops here and there, but this picture reminds me of the detail that I sometimes forget-that Jesus lived in a world much like mine, filled with filth and disease and evil. A world which needed Him desperately then and still does today. The evil I see around me is nothing new. Jesus, however, did not run cowering from it like I am tempted to do sometimes. He did not just sit back and hope someone else would do something about it. He reached out and touched the sick and gave them the joy of knowing their sins were forgiven. He gave them unconditional love and acceptance. And He gave me an example to follow, an example of what I am to do for the world around me today.

Lord, thank you for loving that leper so much that You stopped and healed him from his terrible disease. Thank You for loving me the same way. Help me to follow Your example, reaching out to those who are lost and unloved.

Janine Miller