You've prayed for the same thing for years. You've asked, you've waited, you've tried to keep the faith. And nothing's changed. The illness is still there. The relationship is still broken. The longing hasn't gone anywhere.

If that's you, this Sunday's talk at Crowd was for you.

Mark Buchannan took us into one of the most beautiful stories in the gospels — a woman who'd been ill for twelve years, lost everything trying to get well, and was invisible to the world around her. Mark called the talk Bumping Into Jesus Isn't Enough, and the question he sat with was a quiet, hard one. What happens when faith feels like a long wait with no answer?

Twelve years of getting worse, not better

Mark 5:21-43 holds two healings stitched together. Jesus is on his way to the home of Jairus, a synagogue leader whose daughter is dying. Important man, urgent need, big crowd following. And in the middle of all that noise, somebody almost no one notices reaches out and touches him.

She's been bleeding for twelve years. She's spent everything she had on doctors, and the text says plainly — instead of getting better, she grew worse. Under Jewish ritual law, her condition meant she was unclean. Anyone she touched would also become unclean. Any seat she sat on. So she lived as an outcast — physically exhausted, financially ruined, socially invisible, and (in the religious framework she'd grown up in) cut off from God.

She wasn't supposed to be in that crowd at all. She'd taken a real risk by being there.

And here's what Mark drew out — hundreds of people were touching Jesus that day, jostling him from every side. But only one of them had a supernatural encounter. The difference wasn't proximity. The difference was that she reached.

"It's not enough to be in the crowd. It's not even enough to be in the same room as Jesus. We have to reach out."

Healing in the corner of his cloak

The detail Mark drew out here was lovely. The text says the woman touched the tassel on the corner of Jesus' shawl. The Hebrew word for that corner — kanaf — is the same word that gets translated "wings."

Centuries earlier, Malachi prophesied that the Messiah would "rise with healing in his wings." Mark, growing up singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing in his dad's chapel in Liverpool, used to wonder what the line "risen with healing in his wings" was on about. Jesus didn't have wings. Turns out the song was pointing back to Malachi all along — healing in the corner of his robes. Healing in the place this woman reached out and touched.

She'd worked out who Jesus was. And she did the one thing she had strength for. She reached.

What Jesus does next is the bit you don't want to miss

He stops the whole procession. He leaves an important man waiting with a dying daughter and an urgent crowd — and Jesus stops to find the woman who touched him.

She comes forward, terrified, and tells him everything. And Jesus says, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."

She's the only woman in the gospels Jesus ever calls "daughter." He takes a father's role with her — which, in that culture, was the most affection and dignity he could publicly offer a woman he wasn't married to. He doesn't just heal her body. He restores her name, her belonging, her place. And he does it loudly, in front of the synagogue leader who'd have been the one to declare her unclean in the first place.

The fuller reading of "go in peace and be freed from your suffering" is something like come into my peace, and be permanently released from your scourging. Not just an instant fix. A lasting wholeness. Shalom.

But what about when nothing's changed?

Sharon asked the question a lot of us are sitting with. What about people who've been praying for years and not got the answer? What about the ones who reached, and reached, and are still waiting?

Dave took this one. He has an ongoing illness. He prays for healing for other people and sees God do remarkable things. He's not been healed himself.

He talked about the time he got angry — couldn't pray for anyone for about three months because he was so confused about why God was healing through him but not healing him. Then one early morning, around 2am, he heard something settle in his spirit. Not an audible voice, just a sense. "Dave, you've never healed anybody. It's me who does the healing."

He's still ill. He still wants to be well — more than anyone, he said. But his focus has shifted. "He may not have healed you yet, but he's not abandoned you. He's right there with you."

Mark shared about his mum, who had MS for as long as he could remember. She was at Spring Harvest one year, sat next to another woman in a wheelchair who also had MS. The other woman was healed and walked out of the big top carrying her own wheelchair. His mum wasn't.

"To the day she died, she was adamant God is a God who heals."

That's the line Mark has carried with him. We don't know why some are healed now and some aren't. What we do know is the kind of Jesus we're reaching for. And — Mark was firm on this — we never heap guilt on the person who's not healed. That isn't how Jesus treated the woman in the crowd, and it isn't how he treats us.

So how do we actually push through?

Ellis asked the question directly in the comments — might sound silly, but how do you push through?

The community had a few honest answers between them:

• Use what you've got. The woman didn't have much strength left after twelve years of bleeding. But the little she had was enough. We can always open our mouth — speak what's true about God even when we can't feel it. Mark referenced Derek Prince's practice of saying scripture aloud, putting the right words in our mouth.
• Camp in scripture. Dave's instinct is to find what God's word says about whatever he's facing, settle there, and start to speak it back. "It stirs faith in me. It makes a way."
• Don't do it alone. We're not built to push through in isolation. Find people you trust who can sit with you, open scripture with you, and pray for you when you've run out of words.
• Pray first instead of panicking first. Alicia put this in the chat and it landed. Sometimes pushing through to touch Jesus just means going to him first, before we go anywhere else.

The line that ties it all together

Right at the end, Mark landed on this.

"Jesus doesn't have a VIP list."

In Mark 5, both the synagogue leader (high status, well-connected) and the unnamed bleeding woman (no status, no name) get exactly what they need from the same Jesus. There's no queue. No waiting list for the right kind of person. Both reach. Both are met.

Whoever you are tonight — whether you've been praying for two weeks or twelve years — that's still true.

A word for the ones still waiting

Near the end of the conversation, a viewer called Zoe wrote in the comments. "I've had a debilitating illness for 5 years but only just come to God. I've prayed for healing but not received it yet. This conversation is good to hear and continues to give me hope."

If that's where you are too — keep reaching. The Jesus who stopped for the woman in the crowd is the same Jesus who notices you. He sees the years. He sees the asking. He sees the ache you've not put into words yet.

You're not invisible to him. You're not on the wrong list. And whatever's still unanswered tonight, he hasn't moved.

If this resonated, watch the full talk at crowd.church — and come hang out with us next Sunday as we keep going through Jesus the Revolutionary.