But Jesus overheard them and said to Jairus, “Don’t be afraid. Just have faith.” Mark 5:36
There are few things harder than watching someone else receive the answer you’ve been begging God for.
Your friend announces her pregnancy while you’ve been struggling to conceive. Someone else gets the job while you’re wondering how you’ll pay next month’s rent. It’s hard to be happy for someone else while you’re still wondering, “God, what about me?”
A man in the Bible named Jairus once faced an agonizing wait. His little girl was dying. He begged Jesus to come to his home and heal her. Jesus set off with him but on the way, a sick woman touched Jesus’s robe and was instantly healed. Jesus stopped to talk to her.
Imagine being Jairus. His daughter is dying, and Jesus is having a conversation with someone who has already been healed. Then the message arrives: “Your daughter is dead. There’s no use troubling the Teacher now” (Mark 5:35). But Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid. Just have faith” (Mark 5:36). Then He continues to Jairus’s home, takes the child by the hand, and raises her back to life.
When that message arrived, Jairus knew only that his daughter was dead. He hadn’t yet seen what Jesus would do. That’s where many of us live: in the middle of the story, where God’s attention to someone else can feel like His absence from ours. The Bible doesn’t promise that every story will end as Jairus’s did. Faith isn’t confidence that God will give us the outcome we want. It’s trusting that a delay we don’t understand isn’t proof that God has stopped caring.
When someone else’s answer brings your own pain to the surface, you don’t have to hide it from God. “What about me?” can be a prayer. Someone else receiving His care doesn’t mean you’ve been forgotten.
