Jesus is a wonderful healer, right? He heals all sorts of people, with various illnesses, in all the Gospels. Sometimes people just touch Him and they are healed. Sometimes He needs to do something, like reach out to them or even touch them in a particular way. Sometimes (twice in Mark's Gospel) He even heals someone at a distance. The only time when Jesus is not able to work great miracles is in Nazareth, His hometown, where He is amazed at the lack of faith of the people. There He could not do any miracles, except lay His hands on a few sick people and heal them (Mk 6: 5) So what do we make of today's Gospel reading (Mk 8: 22-26) where Jesus does what we might call a "two-step" healing. In the only time in the Gospels when something like this happens, Jesus attempts to heal someone-- a blind man-- and the healing is imperfect. After Jesus lays hands on the man, he can see better, but his eyesight isn't what it should be. The man says that he "sees people looking like trees and walking." So Jesus does more, tries again if you will, laying hands on the man a second time. This time the healing is complete, and the man's eyesight is restored. He can see everything clearly. What is going on here? How can it be that Jesus isn't completely successful on His first try? What was the problem? I think it is worth noting that the blind man is brought to Jesus by his friends, and doesn't speak a word about wanting to be healed. Those who brough the man do the asking. We know the blind man can speak-- he speaks perfectly well when Jesus asks him about his sight after Jesus first lays hands on him. So why doesn't the man himself ask to be healed, as so many others do in the Gospels? Perhaps in some measure he is like the folks in Nazareth: he lacks faith. He has enough faith to allow himself to be brought to Jesus, but not so much that he is willing to put himself out there and ask to be healed. He's just going to show up and see what happens. And, with that hypothesis in mind, maybe Jesus does the incomplete healing so that the man can come to a deeper faith. Once that deeper faith is in place, the man is like so many others who are healed as a result of their faith. Maybe many of us have some of the blind man's imperfect faith as well. We are people who say: "Yes I believe, but help me in my unbelief." We are a combination of faith and doubt. Jesus works with us in that kind of place, trying to give us experiences that build up our faith bit by bit. Sure, sometimes people have an experience like that of Paul on the road to Damascus, blinded by a flash of light. But mostly we don't. We couldn't handle that sort of thing. We move in baby-steps, because that's what we can take. I had one of those experiences yesterday. I was at our place in Wisconsin and had stupidly failed to close the driver's side door in my car after I parked it in the garage the day before. When I came out yesterday morning the battery was completely dead. So I called AAA and a nice guy came out to start my car. He attached his booster battery to my car, and I turned over the engine, but it wouldn't start. We tried it a bunch of times, with the same result. The lights, radio, gauges, etc. all worked, and the engine turned over, but it would not fire. As we puzzled about the problem, the guy from AAA said that sometimes cars have a feature where if the battery completely dies, you have to take them to a dealer to get something reset before you can start it again. I have a 2009 Infiniti, and there are no Infiniti dealers in northwest Wisconsin. Yikes, I thought, this is going to be a real mess. The AAA guy said there was someone in Spooner who worked on "foreign cars" and someone else in Rice Lake, so I said let's go inside to call them and see if you can tow the car there. As we were about to go inside and use the phone, a voice inside my head said: "Try the car one more time." In my head I had been talking to God about the problem, although I have to admit that I didn't really ask for help. But the voice in my head said to try the car again, despite having tried it a bunch of times and, you've guessed this already, I did and it started right up. The Holy Spirit? Maybe. A little boost to my faith-- you bet. You never know when the Lord will pick a time to give you just a taste of what it truly would be like to have the kind of faith that would move mountains, or allow true healing. That taste might be designed to give us the faith to ask for more.