Twelve years is a long time. A toddler becomes a teenager in twelve years. A pimply teenager can become a doctor in twelve years. If you plan right, you can pay off a 15-year mortgage in twelve years. 

Twelve years is a long time -- a very long time to be sick. 

Twelve hours of the flu is bad enough. One can only imagine how desperate the woman “with the issue of blood” was to be healed after TWELVE YEARS of being sick. 

Seriously. She must have been desperate. 

Desperation, thankfully, is an emotion that we don’t feel too often. We feel it when a child is lost. We feel it when we are infertile. We feel it when we are out of money and don’t know whether to pay for food, housing or medicine. 

And even though for the most part we don’t feel it often, we know how it feels. Proverbs 13:12 nails it: Hope deferred makes the heart sick. (NIV) 

Our “sick” desperate heart causes us to despair, give up, become hyper-focused on what we are missing or sin. 

Desperation is common, but it is not a state in which God planned for us to live. 

Jesus explained: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10 NIV) 

The thief (a.k.a. life, the enemy or desperation) steals, kills and destroys. It leaves our sick and tired heart for dead. 

But, Jesus came to give us life. The life He offers is not the life that others offer; it is a full, abundant life. Life was in Him, and that life was the light of men. (John 1:4 HCSB) 

Twelve years was a long time for the woman “with the issue of blood” to stumble in the darkness of desperation. Twelve years was long enough for her to catch a glimmer of light as Jesus came by -- and to choose the life that He alone could offer. 

The question today, dear one, is: how long will it take you to let go of your situation and reach for the life that Jesus offers? 

By LaRaine Rice