The Hand That Did Not Hesitate

Today's Poem inspired by Matthew 8:3

Before the word was spoken

there was a movement,

a reaching that crossed law and silence,

a hand unafraid of what it would find.

Dust still clung to the road,

crowds still held their breath,

but compassion stepped forward

faster than caution could speak.

He stood there marked by absence—

absence of touch,

absence of welcome,

absence of a future spoken aloud.

Skin told a story the village would not forget,

a story written in distance and warning cries.

Yet he came close anyway,

faith trembling but stubborn,

placing his hope not in power alone

but in desire.

If you are willing.

The question hung in the air

like incense with no altar,

like prayer that had learned not to assume.

Not can you,

but will you.

Not do you have strength,

but do you have mercy to spare.

And the answer did not arrive first as sound.

It arrived as nearness.

As skin meeting skin.

As holiness refusing to protect itself

by withdrawal.

The hand touched what history had rejected.

Touched what religion had labeled dangerous.

Touched the body everyone else had turned into a boundary.

And in that moment,

the rules of contagion broke apart—

uncleanness did not spread upward,

life poured downward instead.

I am willing.

Two words strong enough

to undo years of isolation.

Two words that carried the weight

of heaven leaning toward earth.

Willing to be misunderstood.

Willing to be questioned.

Willing to stand too close

to suffering.

Be clean.

Not a wish.

Not a hope.

A declaration that rearranged flesh and future alike.

The disease loosened its grip.

The exile ended.

The body remembered what wholeness felt like

and answered immediately.

Clean meant more than healed.

It meant named again.

Seen again.

Allowed back into the sound of voices,

the warmth of rooms,

the rhythm of ordinary days.

It meant no more shouting warnings from a distance,

no more watching life pass by

from the edges.

The hand withdrew,

but its meaning remained.

A truth etched deeper than skin:

that God’s holiness is not allergic to brokenness,

that divine power does not flinch,

that mercy moves first

and explains itself later.

Somewhere on that road

dust settled again,

the crowd exhaled,

and the man stood whole

where he had once knelt afraid.

And the world learned, quietly,

that willingness

is the shape love takes

when it decides

to heal.