I wrote a devotion about the woman in Mark 5 many years ago.
Back then, twelve years was just a number in her story. But today, reading the story of the bleeding woman, those twelve years stood out so much more.
Because it has been twelve years since my own life blew up.
Twelve years.
There is something about living through a number that changes the way you read it.
Mark tells us about a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. We don’t know her name. We don’t know how old she was. We don’t know if she had a husband or children or what her life looked like before the bleeding began.
We just know that she had suffered.
For twelve years.
She had gone to doctor after doctor. She had spent everything she had trying to get better. And Scripture says that instead of getting better, she had gotten worse.
I wonder how many times she thought, Maybe this will be the thing that fixes me.
And it wasn’t.
Another doctor.
Another disappointment.
Another year.
Until one year became five.
Five became ten.
And ten became twelve.
Twelve years is a long time to suffer.
I understand that differently now.
My suffering doesn’t look like hers. I haven’t spent twelve years physically bleeding. But emotionally, there were years when it felt like the life was being drained right out of me.
Twelve years ago, my life blew up.
Some of it was because of choices I made. Some of the pain was mine to own. Some came from what happened afterward. There was loss and shame and guilt. There were relationships that changed forever. There were consequences I couldn’t undo.
And somewhere along the way, twelve years passed.
There were years when I ran from God.
Years when I was angry.
Years when I hid.
Years when I wondered whether the woman I had once been was gone forever.
And there were years when God quietly began putting pieces back together.
That’s why I read her story differently today.
This woman had heard about Jesus.
That’s all it took to awaken something inside her that twelve years of disappointment hadn’t completely killed.
Hope.
She believed that if she could just touch His clothes, she would be healed.
So she went.
Imagine the courage it must have taken simply to enter that crowd. She pushed through people until she was close enough to reach for Him.
And she touched His garment.
Immediately, the bleeding stopped.
After twelve years.
Can you imagine that moment?
The thing that had defined her days for more than a decade was suddenly over.
She could have disappeared into the crowd with her healing.
But Jesus stopped.
“Who touched my clothes?”
Of course someone had touched Him. There were people everywhere. His disciples made sure to point that out—as if Jesus didn’t know.
But Jesus wasn’t going to let her leave believing that all she had received from Him was a healed body.
He wanted her.
The woman came trembling and fell at His feet and told Him the whole truth.
And Jesus said something to her that I can’t stop thinking about now.
“Daughter.”
We never learn her name.
But we learn what Jesus called her.
Daughter.
For twelve years she had been known by what was wrong with her.
The bleeding woman.
The unclean woman.
The suffering woman.
The woman who couldn’t get better.
Jesus gave her another name.
Daughter.
And maybe that is what I understand now that I couldn’t have understood when I first wrote about her years ago.
Sometimes healing isn’t God returning us to the person we were before everything happened.
Sometimes healing is discovering who we are after it.
I spent a lot of years wishing I could go backward.
Back to the woman before the affair.
Before the divorce.
Before the church fallout.
Before the shame.
Before I disappointed people.
Before I disappointed myself.
I wanted God to somehow erase the story.
But He hasn’t.
Instead, He has met me inside of the blowup.
And somewhere during these twelve years, I stopped asking Him to make me the woman I used to be.
I’m starting to understand that He is making me someone new.
Maybe you have your own twelve years.
Maybe it’s three.
Maybe it’s twenty.
Maybe you’re still counting.
Maybe you’ve tried everything you know to fix what hurts and somehow you still find yourself carrying it.
The woman in Mark 5 reminds me that the length of our suffering does not determine the ending of our story.
Twelve years wasn’t too long for Jesus.
Neither is yours.
And neither was mine.
Maybe the greatest miracle isn’t that we get our old lives back.
Maybe it’s that after everything we’ve lost, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve survived, and everything we wish we could change, we reach for Jesus and discover He hasn’t lost sight of us in the crowd.
He stops.
He sees us.
And He calls us closer.
Not by our failure.
Not by our shame.
Not by the thing that happened twelve years ago.
Daughter.
