The fear was always there, like a dog curled up in the corner. Sometimes growling quietly in its sleep and sometimes drowning out everything else with its barking.
I was full of hope each time I saw a new doctor. I would hope for a day, a week, a month – and then realise that nothing had changed. I was still unclean, bleeding, tired, ill, and frightened.
Hope wears you down after a while. Better not to hope, that way you don’t get disappointed.
I heard about a healer. He was good. But he was a holy man, a rabbi, and I was a woman, and unclean. There was no way he would touch me. Forget about it, I told myself.
But he had got into my head.
Nobody noticed me, nobody made way for me. So many people – where was he? I’d never find him. The dead weight of despair was back, so heavy I couldn’t keep on my feet. I stumbled and fell on the robe of the man in front of me.
It was a beautiful piece of cloth. I had never seen anything so beautiful. Light shone out of it. Soft, so soft that I wanted to bury my face in it and weep until all the pain had gone.
‘Who touched me?’
I saw in his face that he understood everything about me. Yet he looked at me as if I was the most precious person in the world.
‘My Lord’ I sobbed, ‘My Lord, I have been –‘
‘I know’ he said. ‘But your faith has healed you.’
He took my pain, my fear, my shame, my suffering, my hopelessness and my anger.
He made me clean.
And I can do nothing for him.
You can read about the woman with the haemorrhage here.