The day I met Jesus

My mate Barnabus and I had been begging on these streets for years.  We were well known in the neighbourhood and we had a number of friends and acquaintances who regularly gave us alms and food and sometimes helped us if we needed to go anywhere or do something unusual.   Normally we sat under the colonnade in the market square from sunrise to sunset and begged. Barnabus had been blind from birth.  He was able to see shadows and light out of his left eye and nothing at all out of his right.  So he was pretty dependent on the income we got from begging on the streets.    I was more fortunate - or less, depending on how you look at it.   I had only been blind for about seven years, as the result of an accident at my workplace.   I had been a miller grinding grain for the local farmers to sell to the bakers.  In one of those weird freak happenings, a sack of freshly ground flour had burst open as I was moving it and flour had go...

My life was an utter nightmare.  I was in constant pain from cramping and nausea.  I was exhausted with no energy and I often felt dizzy.  I was ceremonially unclean all the time and so had to keep myself away from people and couldnt live anything like a normal life .  And I had spent an absolute fortune on doctors and medicines and treatments - none of which had made any improvement at all.  In fact some had made things worse. The treatments I had undergone included attempted cauterisation of my uterus,  poultices and potions to be ingested and applied externally, and prayer for deliverance as the priests thought I might have a spirit of infirmity or be cursed in some way.   I was miserable and completely without any hope.  I had had the condition for twelve years.  I was unmarriageable, and therefore a burden on my family.  I couldnt work because I was unclean and unfit.  My mental health was suffering and I could see no fu...

I was never that keen on my name.   My parents named me Jairus because it means ' God enlightens ' which I always felt was a bit..... well, sort of insulting really.  It made me feel that I was a bit stupid and in need of enlightenment.  As though my parents had looked at me and thought - this is going to be a child who needs God to show him something, anything.   It was an uncommon name at that time and I did get a bit of stick about it from my friends and all in all I was left wishing I had been called something else. Anyhow,  that is all beside the point.   I had become a successful businessman, a leader in the synagogue in Capernaum , a husband to the daughter of a prominent city elder and father to three children.   I had pretty much everything I wanted or needed in life, and what I didnt have I was able to buy.   I lived in a large house in the middle of town and had servants, grooms, a cook and a scribe.  ...

We had been on the alert for weeks.   Our supreme ruler had encountered Him in the desert and had spent forty days probing and testing Him, trying to find a chink in His armour, a weakness in His spirit, a glimmer of sin in his soul.   He had failed and had let it be known in the spirit realm that it was going to take the combined forces of Hell to defeat Him.    We knew He was on the move and everything within us bristled with anticipation at the battle which was to come.   We did not know how or where or when, but we knew that He had declared war on us with His talk of ushering in the Kingdom of God.  We were hungry for a fight - we loved a battle - and we were preparing by increasing our activity in the human realm, recruiting hosts we could use to cause disbelief, inertia, disillusionment and despair in the physical world.   In the spiritual world our leaders were planning and plotting their next moves. We had found an ideal h...

I was a stonemason by profession, as was my father and his father before him.  We ran a small business which made us a good living and we were able to employ several young men from the town.   All was going well, I was married to a woman I adored and I had two lovely children.  Business was booming.  And then I had my accident.   I crushed my right hand under a block of stone when my apprentice slipped on a wet road as we were carrying materials up a hill to a new building site.   Despite the best attentions of the local doctors, nothing could be done to restore movement into my hand and from that day forward my life had changed drastically.   I had to restrict my working life to speaking to clients, pricing work, collecting accounts and paying the men.   I was in constant pain and had taken to drinking strong wine to try to combat this.  I didnt sleep well and I knew that my mood was often dark and difficult for my f...

As far back as I can remember I was a bit of a misfit.   I was very smart at school and could read both Hebrew and Greek easily by the time I was ten.  I was also good with figures, but my sharp intellect made me unpopular with boys my own age.   My parents, Alpheus and Magda, were older than most and I was an only child, which also singled me out as unusual amongst my peers.   I tended to keep myself to myself and by the time I was a young man I found myself living alone and reasonably happily self sufficient.   I had found employment initially with the temple money changers because I had no difficulty in doing the exchange rate calculations between Greek and Roman coinage and the temple shekles.   But the work was uninteresting and after a couple of years I found myself itching to do something more challenging. When the Roman prefect Pilate came to power when I was in my late teens, he appointed tax collectors to oversee the col...

I had been paralysed in an accident at work when I fell from a scaffold whilst working on Pontius  Pilate 's palace.  The doctors told me that I had broken my back and that I would never walk again.   At that time I had a wife and three young children.  With no income life had become very difficult for  us. My wife had had to find work helping the local apothecary making up healing salves and potions.  Her sisters and mother helped to look after the children and my brother and cousin helped to look after  me. Our lives were full of other people and I hated having to be dependent on everyone else.  I became  angry with God and bitter towards those around me  I could see nothing ahead of me except more of the same . To be perfectly honest I didn't really see the point of still being alive. I was deeply depressed and I knew I was being a nightmare to live with and care for. The day I met Jesus had started ...