Posts tagged chronic disease
Navigating an Identity Crisis after Medical Trauma

Looking back, my first identity crisis was a struggle to understand my value apart from my physical appearance. Later identity crises would focus on my physical ability, my mental capacity, and my role as wife and mother.  

With every major medical crisis, I’ve had an identity crisis. Each time, the same question returns: Who am I now? 

My spinal cord injury, the latest medical crisis in a stream of crises, created a new slew of questions. The questions may have changed but the answer is the same. I am a beloved child of God.

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Your Problem is a Light Thing for the Lord

We think our chronic illness is a 605 pound, bar-bending beast and we cannot find our way out from under it. But it is as light as a toothpick for our all-powerful God. Why do we try to handle our beasts alone, in our own pitiful strength? We are fools to do that when God is standing beside us ready to lift a finger and lighten our load. He is more than able.

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We are the Blind Man

Congenital blindness is untreatable (v.32). In the opening verses of John 9, the disciples don’t question if the man born blind can be healed by Jesus because they assume a congenital defect is beyond a miracle. Instead, they use the man’s predicament as an opportunity for Jesus to clarify a debated question. “Who sinned to cause this blindness,” they ask, “the man or his parents?”

We have an innate desire to connect cause with effect. But from Jesus’ reply we learn that causation is not as important as purpose. Jesus answers that neither the parents nor the man sinned—the blindness existed so that the wondrous signs of God could be displayed.

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DEVOTIONAL: Find Victory in God

For as long as my lungs have bled, I have wanted a doctor with enough wisdom to explain why my body continues to grow bad blood vessels and how to stop it from growing more.

On the other side of human limits we find hope in the infinite strength and wisdom of God. Where man’s abilities end we can find a new beginning — to trust “in the name of the Lord our God.”

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