Light Afflictions: Finding Faith Through Chronic Illness When Your Body Still Breaks

The doctor said it plainly, the way doctors do when they've said it before to other women in other rooms.

"Primary ovarian insufficiency."

I nodded. I always nod. I've had thirty years of practice at nodding while my heart drops through the floor.

Thirty years. Let that land. I was seven years old when my body started breaking — a laughing little girl on a hammock one moment, headfirst on the concrete the next, and nothing ever quite right afterward. Sleepless nights. Aching joints. A body that didn't feel like everyone else's.

Since then, the diagnoses have piled up like stones on a grave I keep refusing to lie down in:

Fibromyalgia. Rheumatoid arthritis. Pelvic congestion syndrome. Chronic fatigue syndrome. ADHD. Chronic insomnia. Sleep apnea. Hormonal chaos and skin that tells on me.

And now this. At 39.

Every new diagnosis has felt like another door closing. Another room in my own body I'm no longer allowed to enter.

The Question I'm Not Supposed to Ask

Can I tell you the thought I'm not supposed to have as a Christian woman?

I do everything right. Why am I still sick?

I eat cleaner than anyone I know. I read every label. I research every ingredient. I make my own spice blends for insulin sensitivity. I freeze guava pulp in 100-gram cubes because my dietitian told me I need the vitamin C. I lift weights three days a week through pain that would put most people in bed. I take the supplements. I drink the water. I do the sleep hygiene. I steward this body like it's my full-time job — because it basically is.

And I watch people eat drive-through burgers and chase them with soda, never read a single label, never think twice about seed oils — and they're fine. They're fine!

It makes me want to scream. Sometimes, alone in my kitchen at midnight, I do.

If you've ever thought it too — if you've ever whispered "God, I'm doing everything I can, why isn't it enough?" — I need you to know you're not faithless for asking. Faith through chronic illness doesn't require pretending those questions don't exist. You're human. And you're in better company than you think.

When My Feet Almost Slipped

There's a psalm for this exact feeling, and it might be the most honest prayer in the whole Bible.

"But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked" (Psalm 73:2-3).

Read that again. The psalmist — a worship leader, a man of God — looked around at people who didn't honor God, didn't steward anything, didn't try at all... and they were thriving. Meanwhile he was scrubbing his heart clean every morning for nothing. His words, not mine: "Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure" (Psalm 73:13).

In vain. He said the quiet part out loud.

I've sat in that psalm. I've lived in it. The watching-others-thrive-while-you-decay feeling. The math that doesn't math. The obedience that doesn't seem to work.

But the psalm doesn't end there, and neither does my story. "Till I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end" (Psalm 73:17). It was in God's presence — not in figuring out the formula — that everything reframed. The psalmist didn't get an explanation. He got God. And it was enough.

Job never got his "why" either. Job did everything right — blameless, upright, the most righteous man of his generation — and lost everything while his friends insisted he must have done something wrong. Sound familiar? Every chronically ill woman has met Job's friends. They're the ones who say "have you tried yoga?" and "maybe it's stress" and "my cousin's neighbor cured her fibro with celery juice."

God never told Job why. He showed up in a whirlwind and said, in essence: I am God, and I am enough. And Job's response? "I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You" (Job 42:5). The suffering didn't get explained. It got transcended.

Scared, Then Angry, Then Still

When the PCS diagnosis came — another ER visit, another name added to the list — I moved through it in stages. First I was scared. Then I was angry. Then... still.

Not still because the pain got easier. Still because God met me in the middle of the storm. Again.

I want to give you permission to feel all three. So many of us were taught that anger at our circumstances equals anger at God, that grief equals ingratitude, that fear equals faithlessness. That's a lie, and it's kept too many suffering women silent.

I have been angry. I have grieved the body I thought I'd have at 39. I have been afraid — afraid of what my boys see when they watch their mom fade by 3 p.m., afraid of how many more doors will close, afraid that the woman I am in my head will never quite match the woman my body lets me be.

And I have been still. Because "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10) isn't a suggestion for calm people. It's a lifeline for drowning ones.

Here's what I've learned to stop asking: "Why me?"

Here's what I've learned to ask instead: "What now, Lord?"

The first question has no answer this side of heaven. The second one always does.

The Last Two Years

Let me tell you what the last two years actually looked like, because I think some of you are living it right now and nobody believes you.

Cycles stretching fifty days apart. Then longer. Drenching night sweats followed by shaking chills — soaked sheets, then teeth chattering. So exhausted I fainted. More than once. Headaches that moved in and refused to leave. My heart pounding out of nowhere, like my body was running from something I couldn't see.

I stopped breastfeeding, hoping my body would find its way back. It didn't.

I told myself it was stress. Motherhood. Getting older. Perimenopause, maybe, a little early. I got good at pushing through and calling it strength. I got good at smiling through the hot flash in the grocery store. I got good at being the woman who "looks fine."

Invisible illness is its own special loneliness. You look fine, so you must be fine. You cancel plans again and people stop inviting you. You explain your symptoms and watch eyes glaze over. You start to wonder if maybe you are the problem — too sensitive, too dramatic, too much.

You're not. You're paying attention to a body that's been screaming in the only language it has.

"The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit" (Psalm 34:18). He was near in every 3 a.m. sweat-soaked night I thought I spent alone. He was near in every faint. He was near when I stopped breastfeeding and cried, not just for the end of that season, but for the body I kept waiting to "bounce back" that never did.

The Name Changes Everything

Yesterday, the doctor gave it a name: primary ovarian insufficiency.

Looking back, I can see that my body had been trying to tell me something for years. All those symptoms I explained away? They were my body telling the truth while I was busy making excuses for it.

You can't fight what you can't see. You can't steward what you haven't named. And now I have a name, a treatment plan, and a road ahead — blood work, a bone-density scan, a hematology referral to chase down what's happening with my iron and my small, tired red blood cells.

But here's what I need you to understand: the diagnosis didn't fix the grief. It just gave the grief an address.

I'm still holding two things at once. Grief for the years I spent thinking I just needed to try harder — sleep harder, pray harder, push harder. And relief so deep it feels like an exhale. I'm not crazy. I never was.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). I used to read that as consolation for the weak. Now I read it as the whole strategy: His strength doesn't just comfort my weakness. It works through it. The weaker the vessel, the more obvious the power isn't mine.

Paul's "Light" Afflictions

Now let me take you to the verse that undid me this week.

Paul — beaten with rods, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked three times, imprisoned, hungry, sleepless, betrayed, carrying the weight of every church he'd ever planted — Paul looked at all of it and called it "our light affliction, which is but for a moment" (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Light? Momentary? Paul, have you lost your mind?

He answers in the very next breath: "...is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).

Paul wasn't minimizing his suffering. He was measuring it — against eternity. Put thirty years of chronic illness on one side of the scale and the weight of glory on the other, and even the heaviest affliction goes light. Not because it didn't hurt. Because heaven is heavier.

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18).

I have been hard pressed on every side for most of my life. But Paul says "we are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair" (2 Corinthians 4:8). There is a universe of difference between being pressed and being destroyed, and the difference is Him.

My afflictions are not light because they're small. They're light because He is eternal.

Heaven Is the Goal

So here is where I land, and I want you to land here with me:

My eyes are on heaven.

Not as escapism — as orientation. "Set your minds on things above, not on things on the earth" (Colossians 3:2). When your body has been a battleground since you were seven years old, you learn something the healthy may never learn: earth was never going to be the place where everything gets fixed. And that is not depressing. That is the most freeing truth I know.

This body is temporary. Say it with me. Temporary. The pain is temporary. The diagnoses are temporary. The exhaustion, the brain fog, the canceled plans, the 3 a.m. spirals — temporary.

"I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:14). The goal. The upward call. That's the direction my face is pointed, even on the days my body won't cooperate. Especially on those days.

"Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith" (Hebrews 12:2). Eyes on Him. Not on the diagnosis. Not on the lab work. Not on the woman at the grocery store eating junk food with boundless energy while I count my spoons. On Him.

And here is the promise I cling to when the unfairness screams loudest: "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4).

No more pain. Read it again. No more pain. A body that doesn't whisper or shout or betray. Joints that don't ache. Nights unbroken by sweat and chills. Energy that doesn't run out by afternoon. That is not wishful thinking — that is the guaranteed, blood-bought future of everyone who belongs to Him.

"But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:31). I have fainted in this life. I will not faint in the next.

What Faith Through Chronic Illness Has to Look Like to Survive This

Let me be honest about what three decades of this has taught me about faith, because it's probably not what you heard in Sunday school.

Faith is not believing God will heal you on your timeline. Sometimes He does — I've tasted enough healing to know He's able. But sometimes healing doesn't look like a miracle. Sometimes it looks like grace to endure. Strength to keep showing up. Peace that doesn't make sense.

Jesus is still my only hope. Not the supplements. Not the animal-based diet. Not the perfect protocol or the next specialist or the morning I finally wake up restored. All of those are stewardship — and I believe in stewardship down to my bones. But my faith is not in them. It's in the One who walks with me through the valley. And He has never once failed me.

My praise doesn't depend on how I feel. My worship won't wait for a pain-free body. I decided a long time ago that Jesus is worthy — period. Worthy in the flare and worthy in the reprieve. Worthy when the diagnosis comes and worthy when it doesn't. Worthy when I understand and worthy — especially worthy — when I don't.

"Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" (Job 13:15). That's not resignation. That's the fiercest love in the Bible.

And here's the strangest, truest thing: I wouldn't trade what this has made of me. "Tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint" (Romans 5:3-5). The suffering produced something in me that comfort never could have. A hope with roots. A faith with scars. A tenderness toward other hurting women that I could never have faked.

"But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you" (1 Peter 5:10).

After you have suffered a while. Not forever. A while. Glory is coming, and it is eternal, and it will make every affliction — even thirty years of them — look light.

For the Woman Still Waiting

If you're reading this from your own messy middle — the symptoms no one can name, the appointment you're dreading, the diagnosis that just landed, the unfairness that keeps you up at night — come sit with me a minute.

I see you. I know the loneliness of invisible illness. I know the frustration of unanswered prayers and the fatigue of having to fight for every ounce of strength. I know what it's like to do everything right and still get sick. I know the anger you're afraid to admit and the grief you don't have words for.

You are not forgotten. You are not too much. You are not the problem. And your pain is not wasted — not one sleepless night, not one canceled plan, not one tear cried into a pillow at 3 a.m.

Stop asking only "why me?" and start asking "what now, Lord?" The first question has no answer this side of heaven. The second one always does — and the answer is always some version of: walk with Me. Trust Me. Keep your eyes on Me.

Your story doesn't end with the diagnosis. Not even close.

Because healing is holy work — and sometimes the holiest healing isn't the body getting fixed. It's the soul learning, in the middle of the breaking, that heaven is the goal and He is worth it. Every road I walk leads back to Jesus. Even this one. Especially this one.

Still here. Still His. Still becoming.

And one day — whole.

If this met you where you are, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. And if you're walking your own road of unanswered health questions, you're not walking it alone. 🤍

Scriptures referenced: 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 · 2 Corinthians 4:8 · 2 Corinthians 12:9 · Romans 8:18 · Romans 5:3-5 · Philippians 3:14 · Colossians 3:2 · Hebrews 12:2 · Revelation 21:4 · Isaiah 40:31 · Psalm 34:18 · Psalm 46:10 · Psalm 73:2-3, 13, 17 · Job 42:5 · Job 13:15 · 1 Peter 5:10

About Rachel

I'm Rachel, the heart behind Salt & Sustenance. As a Christian wife, mother, and woman navigating chronic illness, I share what I'm learning about nourishing the soul, stewarding the body, and building a life rooted in Jesus. My hope is to remind women that we weren't created merely to survive, and that true sustenance begins with Him.