There was a season of my life, with four young children, when I was getting four to five migraines a week. I tried many medications with some relief, but the side effects were punishing. I felt like I was living in migraine prevention mode every day. The symptoms were a near-constant companion. How do you push on day after day when things are so hard? How do you keep trusting God when your health doesn’t improve?
Ongoing seasons of chronic illness can weigh us down; and they can pose a real challenge to our faith. It’s a challenge to persevere when so many prayers for healing go unanswered. We can feel disappointed in our bodies as they fail us once again. We can struggle to reconcile our knowledge of God’s goodness with our unabating experience of pain. Yet God uses the furnace of chronic illness to refine our faith and teach us precious truths about him and us and the life of faith.
Graciously Accept What He Has Ordained for Us
There can be great temptation to fight against our circumstances or compare our lot with others. Having suffered from severe migraines for almost two decades, God has been slowly teaching me that I have to consciously choose not to do this. This has been so hard for me, particularly when migraines drastically limit my capacity or cause me to miss out.
God uses experiences of chronic illness to teach us to trust that he is using the situation he’s given us for our good. God knows what he is doing, even when we are baffled by the why. And he is faithful in the midst of our difficulty. We can trust that:
because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22–23).
When we wake up each day we can remember God’s great love and faithfulness. We can entrust ourselves to him, knowing he has lovingly placed us where we are with a purpose.
His Sovereignty and Incomparable Goodness
There are seasons with chronic illness when you see no improvements in your health, when the burdens seem to never lighten. These can make us start to doubt what God is doing or if he really knows best. God’s Word leaves us in no doubt about this, for ‘as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways’ (Is 55:8–9). A kids’ book that explores this same idea ends with ‘God’s ways are greater than our ways, and his ways are always best.’[1] What a great catchphrase for us to remember, and to teach our kids! We can’t always comprehend God’s plans, but his plans are always good.
It is so humbling knowing we are not in control. And yet, strangely, it’s a great comfort too. We have such strong ideas about how we want our lives to go. It’s so easy to see both the frustrating little moments and the ongoing hurdles as interruptions to what we really should be doing. Migraines have often felt like this for me. C. S. Lewis challenges how we see these ‘interruptions’:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s own or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending you day by day.[2]
Those interruptions are part of the life God wants for us. Even in illness, that is far greater than what we can imagine for ourselves.
Keep Looking Upwards Rather Than Outwards
It can be easy when we suffer to cast comparing glances at those around us, to think, ‘I should be able to do what they’re doing.’ When you’re struggling with chronic illness, this is understandable, but also especially tempting and dangerous. It’s in our sinful human nature to indulge in self-love. This kind of thinking can make it all about us and not so much about God. Besides, God is far more interested in our heart than worldly measures of productivity.
We need to be actively working at things that lift our eyes off ourselves and onto Jesus. We need to be comfortable with possibly leaving other things undone to make time for nourishment from God’s Word in some way or another. We can’t always put time with God at the end of our to do list. We can spend time with God in the middle of the mess. David wrestles with huge emotions in the Psalms, but is able to remind himself of who God is amidst the chaos. It is good for us to focus our eyes beyond our circumstances, for ‘my soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him’ (Ps 62:1).
God Is at Work in You
There’s so much in life that we would never choose for ourselves. We experience the brokenness of this world in a myriad of ways, including chronic illness. Even though we know God is at work, it doesn’t take away from how hard life can be.
Yet God continues to shape us through periods of long illness, continues to teach us precious truths. Peter reminds us that trials have come so that our ‘faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus is revealed’ (1 Pet 1:7). Our faith is so precious to God, of greater worth than gold. God uses even our experiences of chronic illness to refine our faith.
On the final day when Jesus returns our faith will mean God is glorified and our suffering will be no more. For now, we continue to pray ‘Come Lord Jesus’ as we eagerly await his return.
[1] Tommy Nelson, The Legend of the Three Trees, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2001), p. 22.
[2] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Family Letters 1905-1931, 2004.
