What about chronic illness?

Question 60111.

Chronic illness is a different kind of suffering from the sudden crisis, and the church is often better at the crisis. When somebody collapses there are meals, visits and prayer chains. When somebody has been unwell for eleven years, the casseroles stopped a decade ago and the phone rings less than it used to.

I want to write about that, because a great deal of Christian teaching on suffering assumes a beginning, a middle and an end, and chronic illness frequently has only a middle. What does faithfulness look like when the diagnosis is not going to change?

Long-Term Suffering Is All Over Scripture

The Bible is more familiar with this than we sometimes notice. The woman with the discharge of blood in Mark 5 had suffered for twelve years, had spent everything she had on physicians, and was worse rather than better. The man at the pool of Bethesda had been an invalid for thirty eight years.

Paul’s thorn in the flesh, whatever it was, was permanent. He asked three times and was refused three times, and then carried it for the rest of his ministry. Timothy’s frequent ailments were ongoing enough for Paul to mention them in a letter. Job’s affliction ran long enough for his friends to travel, sit for a week, and then argue at length.

None of these people is presented as a failure. Chronic illness in Scripture is not treated as a spiritual diagnosis, and the assumption that a long term condition indicates something wrong in the sufferer is one the Bible works hard to demolish.

What Makes This Kind of Suffering Distinct

The particular weight of chronic illness is not usually the pain, though that is real. It is the repetition, the loss of a future you had assumed, and the way it quietly rearranges every part of a life without ever producing a moment anyone else can mark.

There is the exhaustion of explaining. There is the guilt of cancelling. There is the strain on a marriage where one person becomes a carer, and the odd loneliness of an illness that does not show on the outside, so that people assume you are fine and are faintly irritated when you are not.

And there is the particular difficulty of hope. Someone waiting for an operation can count down. Chronic illness has no countdown, and learning to live without one is a spiritual discipline nobody volunteers for.

Living Faithfully in a Body That Fails

Paul gives the most useful sentence I know on this in 2 Corinthians 4:16. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

Notice that he does not deny the wasting. He was not a man who pretended. He sets two processes side by side, one visible and downward, the other invisible and upward, and says that both are real at once. That is a description of chronic illness that a sufferer can actually recognise.

He then calls the affliction light and momentary in comparison with an eternal weight of glory, and I would be careful how that is used. Coming from a man who had been stoned, shipwrecked and flogged five times, it is a comparison rather than a dismissal. In anyone else’s mouth it can sound like a slap.

The Temptations That Come With It

Every long illness carries its own temptations, and naming them helps. There is bitterness, which is entirely understandable and slowly corrosive. There is the temptation to define yourself by the condition until it becomes the whole of your identity. And there is despair, which arrives quietly on the days when nothing in particular has gone wrong.

There is also, less obviously, the temptation to spiritual performance: to perform contentment for other Christians because you have picked up that complaint is unspiritual. It is not. Roughly a third of the Psalms are complaints, and they are addressed to God rather than about Him.

And there is the temptation to withdraw, which is the one I would warn about most. Chronic illness makes church attendance genuinely difficult, and the drift out of Christian fellowship is usually gradual and always costly. If you cannot get there, let people come to you.

Chronic Illness and Depression

The connection here is well established and worth stating plainly, because Christians sometimes treat it as a separate spiritual failure. Long term physical illness substantially raises the likelihood of depression, and that is a consequence of the illness rather than evidence of weak faith.

Elijah, immediately after the greatest public victory of his ministry, wanted to die. God’s response was not a rebuke. It was sleep, food, more sleep, more food, and then a quiet conversation. That is a striking pastoral order, and it is worth noticing that the physical came first.

If you are living with chronic illness and you recognise yourself in this, please talk to your doctor as well as to your minister. Treating a depression is not a failure of trust, any more than treating an infection is, and I would say the same to anyone in my own congregation. See what about mental illness.

What the Church Owes You

Congregations are usually willing and often clumsy, so let me be specific. Practical help matters more than words: lifts, shopping, a meal in the freezer, someone to sit with the children. Consistency matters more than intensity; a text every fortnight for three years is worth more than a card in week one.

Access matters. If your building, your service length or your seating makes attendance impossible for someone with a chronic illness, that is a decision the church has made whether it meant to or not. So does a recorded service and a visit with the Lord’s Supper.

And language matters. Asking how someone is and waiting for the real answer, rather than the polite one, is a ministry in itself. So is refusing to offer the latest remedy somebody read about. See how do we comfort those who suffer.

Where the Hope Actually Sits

I am not going to promise you healing, because I cannot, and I have watched people damaged by promises that were not the preacher’s to make. What I can point to is the resurrection of the body, which is the Christian hope and is entirely physical.

Paul says the body is sown in weakness and raised in power, sown perishable and raised imperishable. Revelation says that God will wipe away every tear, and that death and mourning and crying and pain will be no more, because the former things have passed away.

For someone with a chronic illness that is not an abstraction. It is the promise that this body, the one that has failed you daily for years, is not the last word about you. See 1 Corinthians 15:42-44.

Chronic Illness and the Question Why

Most people living with a long term condition arrive sooner or later at the question of why, and I would say two things about it.

The first is that you are allowed to ask. Job asked at length and God did not rebuke him for it; He rebuked the friends who thought they had the answer. Asking is not rebellion. It is what people do when they take God seriously enough to address Him.

The second is that you are unlikely to receive an answer, and that a great deal of energy can be lost in the search. Some people find that the question quietly changes over the years from why has this happened to what will I do with it, and that this is not resignation but a kind of freedom. I would not rush anyone towards that, and I have seen it arrive.

Small Faithfulness Counts

One of the things chronic illness steals is the sense that your life is producing anything. The plans have gone, the career may have gone, the service you used to give has gone, and what is left can feel like maintenance.

Scripture has a different accounting system. The widow’s two coins were worth more than the large sums, because the measure was not the amount but the cost. A day endured with faith, a prayer prayed from bed, a kind word to a nurse: these are not the leftovers of a Christian life. On the New Testament’s terms they may be the substance of it.

I have known housebound believers whose intercession has held up ministries they will never see. If that is where you are, do not measure your usefulness by what you can no longer do. See Mark 12:41-44.

So, now what?

If you are living with chronic illness, I would say three things. Do not let anyone tell you this is your fault. Do not withdraw, however tempting it is and however tired you are. And keep telling God the truth about how it actually feels, because the Psalms give you permission and He is not fragile.

And if you know somebody in this position, do one concrete thing this week. Not a promise to pray, though pray. Something they will notice on a Thursday afternoon in the eleventh year, when everyone else has forgotten. Who came to mind just then?

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

2 Corinthians 4:16 (ESV)