Stopping for the One Not on the Errand

Somebody caught you this week.

Not for anything major. They said your name in a hallway, or they came to the door of a room you were leaving, or they touched your arm as you went past and started a sentence with the word sorry.

And you were on your way to something. Something real. Not an errand you invented to feel busy, an actual thing with an actual person at the end of it who was actually waiting.

So you did the thing that everybody in your position does. You kept walking and you turned your head. You gave them your ear and your shoulder and about forty percent of your face, and you answered them accurately while your feet carried on, and you were kind about it, and you were also gone.

They got an answer. They did not get you.

And the reason I want to talk about this rather than about being less busy is that in that hallway, you were right. The thing you were going to genuinely mattered. This is not a story about somebody who should have been less committed.

It is a story about a man who was on his way to a dying child and stopped anyway.

He was already on an errand and it was life or death

Jairus had come and fallen at His feet, and his little daughter was at the point of death, and they were going. There was a crowd and it was pressing in on all sides and everybody was moving.

And in the middle of that, a woman who had been ill for twelve years reached through the crowd and touched the edge of His clothes.

And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes? (Mark 5:30, King James Version)

Turned him about in the press.

Stay on those words for a second, because they are the whole thing. He did not answer over His shoulder. He did not keep walking and call back a blessing. In a crowd, mid journey, on the way to a dying child, He turned all the way around.

That is what makes this account almost unbearable to read honestly. He had the best excuse anybody has ever had for keeping going, and He did not use it.

You are permitted to turn all the way around, and the urgency you are carrying has never once made a thirty second stop impossible. Mark 5:30 has Him turn about in the press on the way to a child at the point of death, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as freedom rather than as one more standard nobody can meet.

Nothing was lost by the stopping

I want to deal with the fear straight away, because it is the real reason nobody stops.

The fear is that the stopping costs the other thing. That the thirty seconds is taken out of somewhere, and the somewhere is a person who needed you.

Read what happened next. While He was still speaking to the woman, people came from Jairus's house and said the girl was dead, and there is a moment where the whole thing looks exactly like what everybody fears.

And then He raised her.

I am not saying that as a promise about your afternoon, and I want to be very careful here, because this site does not trade in guaranteed outcomes and I am not about to start. What I am saying is what the account shows: the stopping did not cost that family their daughter. The delay that looked fatal was not.

You are not choosing between two people when somebody catches your arm, and the thirty seconds has never once been taken out of anybody else's portion. Mark 5:30 records a stop inside the most urgent errand in that chapter. The Spirit of God is the one who can make a person believe there is enough of them to go around.

And notice what He gave her. Not a hand on the head while moving. He gave her His face, and then a conversation, and then a sentence that sent her away whole.

You have a face to give, and it has never once been true that all you had available was a shoulder. The written word says He turned him about rather than that He glanced back, and His Spirit is entirely able to stop a person's feet for the length of an ordinary sentence.

Thirty seconds, turned all the way around

Now let me make this small, because a woman reading this at the end of a long day does not need another large thing.

Thirty seconds. Turned around.

That is the whole practice, and the turning around is the part that does the work. Not the length. A person can tell the difference between somebody who has given them thirty seconds of a body squared up to them and somebody who has given them four minutes over a shoulder, and they will take the thirty seconds every time.

Turning is physical and that is exactly why it works. You cannot half turn. Your feet either stop or they do not, and once they have stopped, everything else about you catches up with the stopping, and the person in front of you feels it land.

Then say you have to go, out loud, and go. That is not rudeness. That is the honesty that makes the thirty seconds real, because a stop with no end announced is a stop the other person spends waiting for you to leave.

You are able to stop your own feet, and no hallway has ever been so busy that a body could not be squared up for half a minute. Mark 5:30 has Him turn about in the middle of a crowd that was pressing on Him from every side. The same Spirit who was in that street is well able to hold a woman still in a corridor for thirty seconds.