IF ONLY

Phew! Where do you think you are going?' a voice asks in a forbidding tone.
'She stinks,' a plump woman remarks before splattering saliva on the rocky ground.

Other voices rise in the crowd and all their vituperations, or in few cases words of sympathy are directed to a little woman slowly making her way into the crowd. Her pale face hangs low in shame yet she keeps moving. She has very little strength and this makes advancing difficult and painfully slow for her. The smell from her body causes the swarm of people to disperse as though she is a plague to be thoroughly avoided. This makes her secret mission easier to accomplish. She had been troubled as she wondered how she could get to him amidst the huge crowd thronging him. As she gets closer to where he is, some distance away, her mind travels down memory lane. She remembers her harrowing experience at the hands of all the physicians she has consulted. There was the nauseating fluid she had to drink for two weeks, the painful needles injected into her body, the strippings, the surgeries et al. Each doctor she had encountered had charged a fortune off her before declaring her disease incurable.

Now she's left with nothing to her name. Nothing... Nobody. Women her age were married with two, three, four kids.
'Who would want a stinky thing like me for a wife?' she mumbles to herself.

Now just a few inches from him whom she trusts to finally rid her of this debilitating illness she has been stuck with for twelve years, a surge of determination empowers her dying system.
'If only... If I can just lay a finger on his robe, I'd be whole.' She puts all her strength into those last few steps that get her standing behind him... and she firmly touches the border of his fastidiously clean white robe before scurrying away like a mouse suddenly exposed to light. Amazingly, she no longer feels the 'drip-drip' of blood that had been landing in full drops, on the absorbent pad underneath.

Ecstasy wells up as it dawns on her that the days of battling with hemorrhage are suddenly over.
'Goodness gra...' Her subdued words, mixed with silent sobs, are interrupted by his voice.
'Who touched my clothes?'
'Master, how can you ask such a question? Here's a multitude thronging you!' one of his followers query.
'Who touched my clothes? Who touched me?' he asks again, his celestial voice tender yet unflinchingly firm. His eyes, beautiful as the clear blue sea reflecting the light of the Sun, wanders in search of her.
'It is I, Master. I did touch you,' she says as she lay at his feet. Still trembling in fright, she tells him her story within the space of three minutes.
'My daughter,' Joshua says with a loving smile spread across his fetching face. He raises her up to stand next to him. 'Your faith has made you whole. Remain healed of that disease. Enjoy your new-found peace, darling.'

(An adaptation of the story of Jesus and the woman with the issue of blood recorded in Mark 5:25-34.)