Do You Want To Get Well? 3 Things To Do When You Feel Stuck (Ep 08)
Have you ever asked yourself why you keep circling back to the same stuck place? The truth is healing is hard work, and sometimes change is much easier said than done.
This episode takes us to the Pool of Bethesda in John 5, where a man who'd been sick for thirty-eight years is asked a question by Jesus that cuts straight to the heart: Do you want to get well? It's not a rhetorical question, and it's not answered easily. Valerie shares her own story of being confronted with this question after losing her children, and what she learned about choosing healingand wholeness. This about whether we're willing to have our lives disrupted when Jesus shows up with an invitation to healing.
In This Episode, You’ll Discover:
Why a truly great question can change a conversation and why Jesus asked so many of them.
The story of the man at the Pool of Bethesda and the question Jesus asked to challenge him.
Why "Do you want to get well?" isn’t always a simple question to answer.
What neuroplasticity reveals about why your brain defaults to the familiar, even when familiar is unhealthy.
Valerie's own story of being confronted with the question, ‘Do you want to get well?’ after losing her children, Tyler and Hailey.
The three-part command Jesus gives the man that required active participation in the process.
The difference between agency and control, and why healing is not passive.
How answering this question means freedom from the places we feel stuck.
Resources Mentioned
The Leading Brave Group Experience: An 8 week live group coaching experience for Christian women ready to trade overthinking and self-doubt for clarity, courage, and confidence. Doors are open now through September 20th for the Fall cohort. Get More Details about Leading Brave.
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Episode 08 | Do You Want to Get Well? 3 Things To Do When You Feel Stuck
Welcome to The Purpose Project Podcast
Hey, friend. Welcome to The Purpose Project Podcast, where we talk about what it really looks like to live, love, and lead with purpose and authenticity in the messy middle — that space between where you are and where you want to be. I'm Valerie Jones, a Christian life and leadership coach, and around here we don't do hustle culture, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or self-help band-aids. Instead, we're all about biblical truth, brain-based tools, and emotional health — so you can walk out your calling with courage without burning out or sacrificing what matters most. Each episode we'll dive into real life stories, engaging conversations, and relatable teaching moments to help you get out of your head and into the life God's calling you to live. Whether you're navigating change, feeling overwhelmed, craving clarity, or just trying to feel like yourself again — take a breath and lean in. You're in the right place. Let's dive in.
A Question Can Change the Room
Well, hey, welcome back. If you're new here, thank you for joining us today. If we've met in real life, you know how much I love a good, thought-provoking question. I'm actually borderline obsessed, honestly, with learning to ask better questions myself.
Have you ever noticed how a great question can completely change the room, or how it can breathe some life into an otherwise flat conversation? That's because it goes beyond information gathering — it creates a moment of connection, which, side note, is something that we all crave and need.
A good question jolts us out of our comfort zone. It switches off autopilot in our brain, and it invites a level of awareness into the moment that wasn't there ten seconds before. It actually releases a flood of neurochemicals that cause your brain to stop what it's doing and pay attention.
And I believe there are psychological and also spiritual implications at play when someone asks a good, thoughtful question. And friends, nobody understands that truth better than Jesus, the One who created us. Now, we know that Jesus was a master storyteller — it's how He taught most of the time. But He also asked a lot of questions — really good questions.
And He never asked a question because He lacked information or didn't know the answer. Jesus knows everything. He's omniscient. We talked about that in Episode 2, when we looked at John chapter 11. So when He asks a question, it's not for His own benefit. It's for the benefit of whomever He's talking to.
He used questions as a way to expose things that might be hidden or buried under the surface — to bring awareness to something that He wanted to address. It's safe to say that when Jesus asks a question, He's typically cutting right to the heart of an issue. And so I want us to go to one of my favorite scenes in Scripture today, in John chapter five.
The Pool of Bethesda
To a place called the Pool of Bethesda. Around that pool, on any given day, you could find a crowd of people who were sick, blind, paralyzed — Scripture uses the word invalid. And these people laid at this pool day after day, waiting for the water to stir, waiting for someone to help them into the water so that they would have a chance to be healed and whole.
Among the crowd, there's one particular man who's been sick for thirty-eight years. Let that sink in — thirty-eight years. That is more than three decades of waiting and watching other people get healed. And so Jesus shows up, in John chapter five, and Scripture tells us that He saw the man and knew that he'd been in this condition for a long time — which is what prompted Him to do what He does next.
He asks the man a question. John 5:5–6 says, "One man was there who'd been disabled for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, He realized he'd already been there a long time. He said to him, 'Do you want to get well?'" Now, on the surface, that seems like a strange thing to ask this man, because of course he wants to get well.
Why else would he be there, at the Pool of Bethesda, where people go to be healed?
But the man doesn't say yes. He doesn't give Jesus a direct answer. He doesn't even ask Jesus to heal him. Instead, he responds with somewhat of a complaint. He says, "I can't, sir" — this is verse seven — "I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me."
Why We Answer the Same Way
So when Jesus asks this man the question, "Do you want to get well?" it's a question about his desire, his want-to. The man responded with hopeless resignation. Knowing what we know about human design, this man had likely been rehearsing that story — one of hopelessness and helplessness — for quite some time, so much so that he probably couldn't even imagine a different reality.
He probably really didn't know what to do with that question: do you want to get well? Sometimes, friend, the same is true for us. Sometimes Jesus walks into an area of our life where we've been paralyzed, or stuck, or resigned to less than God's best for us, and He asks us the same question: do you want to get well?
Do you want something to change? And if we're being honest, when we're confronted with that question, we have a similar kind of response, just like this man. We don't say no outright, but we've already decided that we can't, and so we stay stuck right where we are. This certainly qualifies as a spiritual issue, but there is also something physiological going on.
What do I mean by that? Well, your brain is wired to prefer the familiar because familiar costs less. It's less effort, less risk, less uncertainty. Even if familiar is unhealthy, you choose it anyway, because it's predictable — and to your brain, predictable equals safe.
And so the longer you rehearse the same story, the more that pathway gets reinforced. It's neuroplasticity at work — your brain is literally shaped and reshaped by what you repeat. So any change takes real effort. And it feels unpredictable, which is genuinely terrifying to your nervous system.
My Own Two Questions
That was so profound to me when I realized it, because I've been in seasons where I felt about as stuck as a person can possibly feel. And while I didn't have a physical ailment like this man in John chapter five, there was a spiritual ailment — an emotional sickness.
I felt trapped in a deep pit of grief, despair, and bitterness. I've buried two children, Tyler and Hailey. I know what it means to stand in a moment and think, this is not what my life is supposed to look like. I know what it means to feel helpless and hopeless. If you've been with me from the beginning, you've heard this story — but it took me years to find my way back, and in the process, I had to answer two questions. This was one of them.
Do you want to get well? That question was harder to answer than it might seem, because somewhere along the way, I let the pain and the grief become an identity. I built a life around it instead of walking through it and processing it in a healthy way. So I stayed stuck in that pit of despair longer than I had to.
I learned the hard way that so often we remain in these seasons far too long because we actually get somewhat comfortable there — because at least it's familiar. And we'd rather do what's familiar than what feels hard, even if familiar isn't God's best for us. What I'm saying is this: if you're stuck, it's worth considering whether you've gotten so comfortable being stuck that you're unwilling to partner with the Holy Spirit to do the work required to see meaningful change.
Getting well costs something. It requires something of you. It challenges the status quo. It means doing something different. Staying stuck where you are only requires that you keep doing what you've been doing all along. Back in John 5, this man at the pool is stuck when Jesus asks him this question: "Do you want to get well?"
Stand Up, Take Up Your Mat, Walk
After the man answered Him, you might expect that Jesus would have some consoling words, or maybe that He might even validate his feelings — he had a real limitation, he couldn't walk.
But instead, He says three things. We're going to talk about those. He says, "Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk." Can we not rush past that? Can you imagine what that must have been like, in that moment? Stand up — Jesus is telling this man to do something he hasn't successfully done for thirty-eight years. And the man had a choice to make.
I think sometimes the Holy Spirit says, "Stand up," as a way to break a spirit of helplessness and hopelessness off our lives — especially in situations where our feelings, even though they may be valid, might be getting the best of us. Do you want to get well? Let's start by getting up. And Jesus doesn't stop there.
He says, "Take up your mat." This man wouldn't be needing his mat any longer, because he was healed — he wasn't going to have to lay at the pool. But Jesus doesn't want him to leave it there. He specifically tells him to pick it up. Why? Because it was evidence. It was proof that this man was one way before this moment, and after one encounter with Jesus, he was different.
That mat was a testimony — for him, and for everyone who knew him. It was evidence that Jesus had done something in his life. There's something to be said right here about the significance of your story.
I know there may be parts of your story that you want to leave behind, that you'd rather not tell. Maybe it'd be better for you, you think, if you could just forget it. But listen — your testimony may be the doorway to someone else's healing. Don't forget to remember where you came from and what God has done in your life.
Take up your mat. Finally, Jesus commands the man to walk.
The biggest takeaway here is this: getting well means moving forward. In this case, the man was walking away from the Pool of Bethesda, the place where he'd been stuck for a really long time. Sometimes God asks us to address things externally, or situationally — to move away from the routine, the room, the relationship, the habit, the role, the place where you've been stuck, going through the motions, for years.
A Word About Leading Brave
Hey friend, quick pause. I wanted to take a minute and tell you about Leading Brave. Leading Brave is my eight-week, live group coaching experience for Christian women who are ready to trade overthinking and self-doubt for clarity, courage, and confidence. It's Bible and Brain. Faith and Emotional Health. Real Connection. And real accountability.
If you're the kind of woman who's longing for meaningful change because you're tired of overthinking and second-guessing yourself at every turn, I'd love for you to join us. Doors are open now through September 20th for the Fall cohort.
You'll find the link in the show notes, or at thepurposeproject.us/leading-brave-group-experience.
Now, let's get back to it.
Agency, Not Control
Here's the thing: Jesus healed him. But the man — he had to stand up, pick up that mat, and walk. He had to do what Jesus commanded him. He had to choose to take Jesus at His word.
The man could have decided that day that it wasn't worth the trouble to try to stand up. And maybe that's why so many of us stay stuck longer than we need to, in places we're not meant to be — because healing can actually be quite disruptive.
And being well? Being well means taking responsibility for what we do with our lives after God heals us. So let's make this practical. We're talking about agency — the power to choose. It's not the same thing as control. I am not in any way suggesting that you get to control your circumstances, or that you earn your healing.
What happened in my life — the death of Tyler and Hailey — it was beyond my control. I didn't choose that season. The man at the pool didn't choose to be paralyzed for thirty-eight years. I understand this can be a nuanced and complicated conversation, but what I'm saying is that when Jesus shows up with this question, "Do you want to get well?"
And then He says, "Stand up" — you get to choose to stand. When He says, "Pick up your mat — pick up the thing that's been defining you" — you get to choose whether you carry it forward as a testimony, or leave it there in shame. When He says, "Walk," you get to decide whether you take a step, or stay right where you are.
That's what agency looks like. It's not controlling what happened to you, or what happens to you. It's choosing what you do next. In and through Jesus, we find the grace and the power to do exactly what I'm talking about — and it's His power that's at work for us and in us.
So what about you, friend? Is there an area of your life where you've gotten comfortable with something that doesn't represent God's best for you? Is there something in your life that you need Jesus to make well?
Are you stuck?
Maybe Jesus is asking you the question today: do you want to get well? But listen — He's not going to force it on you. It could be that He's inviting you to stand up, to pick up that mat of yours, whatever it might be, and walk. Hear me, friend: you may not get to choose your circumstance. Not everything that happens to you is in your control.
But you do have a choice to make. You can choose to take Jesus at His word and be well. You can choose to surrender, and submit, and obey, and be well. You don't have to stay stuck. You get to choose.
Until Next Time
Hey friend, thanks for tuning in to The Purpose Project Podcast. I hope today's conversation helped you feel seen and a little less alone in the messy middle of life. If this episode encouraged you, would you take a second to share it with a friend or leave a quick review? That will help other women who need hope and encouragement find this space, and it truly means the world to me.
You can always find free resources, upcoming events, or join the email list by visiting my website, thepurposeproject.us. Remember, friend — you were created on purpose and for a purpose. Until next time, be brave, and eyes on Jesus.
Meet Your Host
I’m Valerie Jones, a Christian Life & Leadership Coach and the host of The Purpose Project Podcast. I created this space for Christian women who are navigating the messy middle: those in-between seasons where faith is real but stretched, and life doesn’t look the way you expected.
My approach is rooted in biblical truth, emotional health, and brain-based methods because I believe God designed us as whole people, and transformation and personal growth should consider our whole selves.
“Jesus healed him. But the man? He had to stand up.”
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