Get Squeamish: Blood and Guts

I'll bet the majority of women spend their periods wondering how it is that women, for centuries, have been able to survive such a substantial amount of blood loss each month.

I was thinking about periods today as I was reading about the woman who bled, who reached out to touch Jesus, and who was healed in her faith.

Bringing up "that time of the month" can be really uncomfortable. Even my sweet daddy, who has been married for a bazillion years to my mom, gets stuttery when he tries to be polite and ask me if I need to pick up any "personal things" at Target when I come home to the "big city" and get stocked up on life supplies (small town struggles).  

I'm sure I lost many readers in the opening sentence even by mentioning that taboo subject (Is she really writing about THAT?).

The Bible sure doesn't shy away, though. It brings up Aunt Flo several times throughout its 66 books. That brings us to the gospels, Luke 8, and the woman who bled. 

This lady had a straight up 12 year period. 

What a miserable existence.

And often, I'll bet, that's where our thinking about her ends, with her blood and with her faith.

God never just stops at the physical though.

You ever pause to think about what her plague entailed?

Women in those days were considered unclean during their periods, banned from the intimacy of relationships. Periods are good, though. They represent a woman's capacity of inhabiting life, even if they didn't take that month's egg up on the option to. 

For our Luke Lady, though, it was a 12 year symbol of death, separation, and shame.

Can you imagine that?

We have nightmares of being turned down for a date, of standing naked in front of the class, of being singled out for our big noses, but those are all pretty fleeting moments of shame.

Picture being known by your qualifier for more than a decade. For her, being known for being "unclean" for 12 years and what that must have done to her personal sense of identity.

Men are thinking, "I don't have a uterus. I can't get there to empathy." So picture just this much: No physical intimacy for 12 years. Nothing. 

It hurts to the bone to go 12 days, 12 weeks without so much as a hug, I would know.

How excruciating that must have been.

And yet. (With God there's always an "and yet") And yet, how beautiful, how wonderful, what an ecstatic sense of relief and glory it must have been to have had that bloody old self ended in one desperate touch. In one desperate move toward hope.

That is the promise of Christ.

That is what we live for: to know that no matter the degree of our unclean existence or removal from dignity, humanity, God is capable and willing to touch us, love us, bring us back to complete selfhood.