#46: Where The Gospel Meets Chronic Illness

#46: Where the Gospel Meets Chronic Illness

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. This type of storytelling and journalism is made possible by donations from people just like you. So to keep this type of content coming to your podcast feed, please make a donation today at lovethyneighborhood.org/donate. Again, that’s lovethyneighborhood.org/donate.

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RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so you know that I had an intern this summer. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yep. 

RACHEL SZABO: And, uh, she actually worked on this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. Okay. 

RACHEL SZABO: And as part of her research for that, you know, she’s on a Facebook group for people who have chronic illnesses and she told me about this post that someone had written in that Facebook group and I just wanna read that post to you. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. 

RACHEL SZABO: So this person says, quote, “There is a cure for cancer. His name is Jesus. There’s a cure for HIV/AIDS. His name is Jesus. There’s a cure for lupus. His name is Jesus. There’s a cure for diabetes. His name is Jesus.” End quote.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. Like I can, I can appreciate this person is really trying to offer hope, like they’re trying to point to Jesus, like he’s the bread of life, you know, uh, he’s the source of all life. And, like, I so get that, but, man, there’s so much in this post that could go south real quick. I mean, especially on social media. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. Well, as you might imagine, it didn’t take long for the comment section of that post –

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, yeah, I bet. 

RACHEL SZABO: – to get flooded with responses. So here are just a few of those responses.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, buckle up. 

RACHEL SZABO: So one of them is – “Well then when is he gonna publish his research?” (laughter) And another one is, “Uh, I think he forgot a few of us.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh. 

RACHEL SZABO: Another one is – “There are Christians who believe other Christians get sick and die because they didn’t pray enough or that their faith wasn’t good enough.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, yeah. 

RACHEL SZABO: And then another one – this one’s really sad – it says, “My mom died of brain cancer. My relatives told me God could heal all things. Why didn’t he save my mother then?” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Yeah. You know, so we don’t really know, like, what the person who made the original post intended, but, like, the comments are revealing. You know, there’s honestly some really bad and harmful theology in this post. I mean, if I break my leg, is it possible that miraculously Jesus is going to heal my leg? It’s possible, but the majority of the time, like, I need to go to the hospital and have a doctor reset my leg. But if I just say, “You have a broken leg, and you know what the cure for your broken leg is? Jesus. And you shouldn’t go to a hospital ’cause you just need Jesus.” Like that’s bad theology. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. I mean there’s a lot we could unpack here. But at the end of the day, I do think that both the person who made the original post and the people who commented on it are wrestling with the same thing, and that is, as Christians, what do we do with long-term illness?

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Every episode we hear stories of social action and Christian community. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets chronic illness. Now, chronic illness is a broad term. It can include things like cancer and diabetes and even mental conditions like depression or bipolar disorder. 

RACHEL SZABO: Right, a chronic illness is simply a medical condition that lasts a year or more and has ongoing impact on your life. So lots of things fall into that category. But for today’s stories, we’re gonna focus mainly on just one type of chronic illness, and that is conditions of chronic pain and chronic fatigue. So when we say chronic illness throughout this episode, that’s the type we’re referring to.

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ll be looking at how these illnesses of pain and fatigue impact our three main relationships in life – with ourself, wIth other people, and with God – and what it means to offer hope to people who never feel completely healthy. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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RACHEL SZABO: So, just out of curiosity, do you know anyone who has a chronic illness? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Um, yeah, actually I know a handful of people that have chronic illness. They’re in pain all the time. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so I know several people with fibromyalgia. Um, I know some folks with lupus, with Crohn’s disease. Yeah. And, um, it’s not surprising. In fact, studies show that anywhere from 45 to 60 percent of American adults have some sort of chronic illness. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s a lot. I mean, up to 60 percent. But we have to remember this – you know, chronic illness covers a lot of different conditions. 

RACHEL SZABO: Sure. So actually many people in that 45 to 60 percent are going to have things like heart disease or diabetes, and those conditions come with their own set of challenges. But for what we’re focusing on today, it’s estimated that 20% of Americans suffer from conditions of chronic pain in general. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so 20 percent. I mean, this is still all a bit impersonal though. Like what would these numbers look like in a day to day scenario? 

RACHEL SZABO: Well, let’s say you have a church congregation of 1500 people, so if 20 percent have some sort of chronic pain, that means 300 people in your congregation are in pain on a regular basis.

JESSE EUBANKS: Whoa. Okay. So from like a church perspective, this is something worth exploring. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. 

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, and I guess the good news is this – we are not the first people to deal with this. And in fact, chronic illness – it’s not a new thing among the people of God. In the gospel of Mark chapter five, Jesus is on his way to heal a little girl and crowds of people are surrounding him and following him and we’re introduced to one person in that crowd, a woman who had had a discharge of blood for 12 years. And she’s in this crowd because she’s heard reports about Jesus, and she’s trying to get near him.

RACHEL SZABO: And based on the definition of a chronic illness being a medical condition that lasts a year or more, I’d say it’s safe to say that this woman who’d been bleeding for 12 years had a chronic illness. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, totally. You know, so Mark doesn’t tell us exactly what type of condition this woman had, but it likely caused her, you know, some degree of intense pain as well as fatigue from anemia. But Mark does give us one interesting detail about her condition. Verse 26 said that she had suffered much under many physicians and was no better, but rather grew worse. 

RACHEL SZABO: So basically she’s gone from doctor to doctor and no one can help her, which is why she’s trying to get near Jesus. And, you know, to me that seems like such an unnecessary thing to emphasize. Honestly, it’s a verse that I never really thought much about until I talked to people who have chronic illness, ’cause they often have a similar story to this woman. And that was certainly the case for a young woman named Kate Smith. So Kate grew up like an everyday active kid. She loved sports, loved to run around. She had taken dance lessons ever since she was three years old. But then, around the time she was eight, something started to happen with her body. 

KATE SMITH: I had, um, pain in my knees, mainly like my knees would swell up after doing any sort of activity.

RACHEL SZABO: So I also took dance growing up and I’ve, like, randomly thrown my back out before and I say that to say, like, when you’re active all the time, stuff like this happens, like it’s normal. So Kate made it a habit to ice her knees after class and didn’t really think much of it. But over the next three years, her pain and her swelling – it got worse and worse to the point that by the time she was 11, she had to quit sports and dance entirely.

KATE SMITH: The fact that I was in so much pain that it really wasn’t, it just wasn’t enjoyable anymore. 

RACHEL SZABO: So at this point, clearly something’s not right. She’s only 11 years old, and she can’t do any physical activity. So her parents took her to see the doctor, and the doctor had an answer to what was happening to Kate. He ended up diagnosing me with fibromyalgia and arthritis.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, wow. Um, okay, so I’ve actually heard about fibromyalgia before, but what is it exactly? 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so fibromyalgia is basically defined as widespread muscle pain and tenderness. So, like, it hurts everywhere, which is why Kate couldn’t do any physical activity anymore. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wow. 

RACHEL SZABO: But now that she had a diagnosis, that wasn’t the end of things. Her pain actually ended up getting even worse once she made it to high school. 

KATE SMITH: I was sick quite a bit from school, just was in so much pain that I, like, couldn’t get out of bed or I was in the hospital quite a bit. There were a few times where, like, an ambulance had to come. It got to a point where we, like, knew the nurses in the emergency room and they knew who we were and there was some nights where I would – like, I couldn’t handle it and I would be, like, screaming in pain. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh, that sounds just so hard. Like, I can’t imagine, you know, just trying to experience life as a high schooler, but I’ve got all of this other physical stuff that I’m dealing with at the same time.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I mean, Kate said that there were even days where she had to use a walker because she couldn’t even stand up on her own. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So is there a treatment for this? Like if, you know, like if her pain is getting worse, I mean, is there a way to, to manage it? 

RACHEL SZABO: So fibromyalgia can be tricky and also I am not a doctor, but what I do know is that right now there are three drugs approved specifically for treating it, so you can try those. There’s also self-care and therapy techniques, but it’s kind of a guessing game as to what will or won’t help. And to make things even more complicated, not all doctors agree. 

KATE SMITH: I had quite a few doctors say that it wasn’t a real diagnosis and that I was, like, making it all up.

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s crazy that she’s feeling all this pain and they’re basically saying, “You’re making this up.” 

RACHEL SZABO: So here’s the thing – with fibromyalgia in particular, doctors are all over the map. So some might think it’s valid, while some might view it as something that other doctors use as a catch-all diagnosis, like, “Oh, you have pain and we don’t know why? Well then you have fibromyalgia.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Mmm. 

RACHEL SZABO: And in that case, the skeptical doctors – they aren’t convinced that it’s real. So when Mark writes in his gospel about the bleeding woman and he says she had suffered much under many physicians and was no better, that’s something that folks with fibromyalgia can definitely relate to. And for Kate, the way that this played out of being bounced from doctor to doctor and being told one thing and then being told another thing, it really started to make her doubt herself.

KATE SMITH: Anytime I go through something, I’m like, “Am I really feeling this? Is this really a symptom, or am I losing my mind?” 

JESSE EUBANKS: So I guess this brings us to the first of the three relationships that are impacted by chronic illness, and that’s your relationship with yourself. I mean because it seems like for Kate, I mean, she’s now full of self-doubt. She’s full of skepticism. 

RACHEL SZABO: Absolutely. Yeah. Questioning and second guessing yourself can become commonplace, and that’s one way that the self gets impacted by chronic illness. But another thing can also happen in relation to yourself, and that is grief.

KATE SMITH: I feel like I’m constantly going through this, like, weird grieving process, and I’m always in different stages of grief for who I think I should be, where I think I should be in life at this point. 

RACHEL SZABO: There’s a real sense of loss for Kate. She’s lost her ability to play sports. She’s lost her ability to socialize with her friends like she used to. And any kind of loss, that’s hard. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. So I also actually ended up speaking with somebody who has a chronic illness, and he talked to me about this idea of grief. Can I talk about that? 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, sure. 

CHAD LEWIS: My therapist, he said, “I want you to list out everything that you used to do that you can’t do anymore.” I was like, “Okay.” And so I thought it’d be a list of three or four things. I’d filled up a couple pages. It was this stark awakening of, like, “Wow, there are so many things that I, I cannot do anymore. Wow, I have lost a lot.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Chad Lewis. Chad is a pastor at Sojourn Church North here in Kentucky. And just like Kate, before his illness set in, life used to be really different.

CHAD LEWIS: I used to play basketball all day, work construction, and all sorts of stuff. So I was a pretty vibrant, active person. 

JESSE EUBANKS: But when he was 33 years old, he started getting these random fevers. 

CHAD LEWIS: I had this cycle of three fevers that were like 103 for seven days straight every few weeks, and it seemed like every time I recovered from that fever I was a little weaker.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so Chad went to the doctor and he was diagnosed with something called chronic fatigue syndrome, but where he was in life, he didn’t have time to be tired. Not only was he in ministry, but he was also newly married. Uh, they had a baby on the way. They had just bought a house. 

CHAD LEWIS: I remember when we were refurbishing our house, or, or tearing out walls, people would come and I was really sick at that time and I would stand and, and hold myself against the door and hold a hammer about to fall over. But I felt guilty that people were helping in my house and I couldn’t help, so I would just push, push, push. 

JESSE EUBANKS: But he’s really sick. So his fellow pastor said, “Hey, why don’t you get away for a few weeks and take some time off?” But coming to terms with the fact that his life could not look the same as it had made it really hard for him to rest.

CHAD LEWIS: And I would wake up in the middle of the night with sweats, not because of my illness, but because of stress because I was having these dreams that I was never gonna be working again. And it was really a great fear. I was like, “Man, I, I, I may never preach again.”

JESSE EUBANKS: And I think, like, on one level, we all relate to this, you know.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. 

JESSE EUBANKS: We’re all living through this pandemic. The world has changed. You know, for a lot of us, you know, things that we did all the time, people that we used to see all the time, places we would travel, like, you know – and for some of us, like, we’ve lost people. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. Like there’s a way we did life before, and now there’s a way that we do life since Covid happened.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

RACHEL SZABO: And folks with chronic illness have a similar experience of, like, there’s a way I did life before I got my illness and there’s a way I do life after and it looks very different. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And the truth is, like, it’s hard to disassociate who you are from what you do. And so suddenly, if you can’t do a lot of the things that you’ve always done in life, you’re left with this question – who are you? And so that’s the first relationship that gets impacted – the relationship to yourself. But it also isn’t the only one that gets affected. 

CHAD LEWIS: It felt very, very lonely. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Coming up – bullying, burdens, and how chronic illness affects your relationship with others. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets chronic illness. 

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ve been hearing from Kate Smith and Chad Lewis, two people who have been diagnosed with a chronic illness that brings a lot of physical pain and fatigue, and we talked about how chronic illness can affect your relationship with yourself, bringing self-doubt and grief. But the second type of relationship it affects is your relationship with others. 

RACHEL SZABO: And that is actually something that Kate experienced very early on. So Kate is still in high school at this point, and she’s spending a good amount of time in and out of the hospital in an attempt to manage her pain. And as you might imagine, that made any sort of friendships pretty difficult. 

KATE SMITH: It was really hard to be with other peers and not knowing what’s going on with my own body and trying to explain it and missing school and being in the hospital and having this experience that, you know, a high schooler shouldn’t have. 

RACHEL SZABO: But the response from her peers to her absence and her illness was not the one that she was expecting. 

KATE SMITH: I was bullied pretty significantly. I remember one time I missed two or three weeks and I came back and somebody said, “Oh, you’re back. I was really excited ’cause I thought you didn’t come to this school anymore.” So stuff like that was really, really hard. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh gosh, that’s horrible, like, to literally have people say like, “Oh, I didn’t think that you were here anymore.” 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and you and I might think, you know, how could a person bully another person who’s suffering? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

RACHEL SZABO: Well, for one thing, high schoolers – they’re just mean sometimes, right? But also the reality is we are often afraid of what we don’t know and what we can’t see, and chronic illness fits both of those categories. In fact, it’s sometimes called an invisible illness because we don’t know a lot about it and we can’t see it. 

MIKE EMLET: We in our churches are primed to see people who are struggling visibly. 

RACHEL SZABO: So this is Mike Emlet. He’s the dean of faculty and a counselor at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, so he counsels a lot of people who have chronic illness and he sees firsthand how the invisibility of it can be a struggle for people. 

MIKE EMLET: Someone’s on crutches or they’re limping or something like that – there’s this obvious manifestation that they’re struggling, but a lot of illnesses, including, you know, chronic pain, you don’t see that necessarily from the outside. So by all accounts, this person isn’t struggling. They look fine. And so that makes it harder, uh, sometimes, right, for when a person says, “Oh, I’m struggling with X,” and we are like, “Well, I don’t, I don’t see evidence of that.” That really is hurtful to people because it approaches them skeptically and only with what we’re observing with our own eyes.

JESSE EUBANKS: It reminds me in some ways of depression, you know. 

RACHEL SZABO: Mm-hmm.

JESSE EUBANKS: Because, like, somebody can be depressed – you know, some people can go like, “Oh, they don’t seem sad.” Or other times people will look and they’ll just go, “Uh, they’re just being moody. Just ignore it.” 

RACHEL SZABO: Or it’s like, “Well just snap out of it.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, right, as if it’s that simple. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. So eventually Kate grew up and so did her peers and so the bullying eventually stopped, but that didn’t mean that things got easy because now there was the challenge of making friends as an adult. That’s a tricky thing in and of itself regardless of if you feel well or not, but for Kate, it felt like there was an extra step or more effort that had to go into making friendships because of her illness.

KATE SMITH: Oh my goodness. It’s very isolating when you have chronic pain and don’t have a good community of people around you. You feel like you’re going through it all on your own. You have this, like, bubble around you and nobody is able to, to get in. 

RACHEL SZABO: And this feeling of isolation perpetuated a new narrative for Kate that not only was she full of self-doubt, but now she thought it’s not okay to ask people for help. 

KATE SMITH: I’ve had time where I needed some more, um, support and just wasn’t able to have people that fully understood what was going on, or if they did I just felt like I couldn’t ask for help. Not that they wouldn’t help me, but that it was all on me. Like I just felt like, “Oh, I don’t need to ask for help. Like, I’ll just figure it out somehow.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, like, all of us at times probably struggle with asking for help, and, you know, it could be a hard thing. But if you’re in a position where you feel like you are constantly having to ask for help, you know, you start to feel like a burden on those people around you. Chad actually talked about this as well, and here’s how he put it.

CHAD LEWIS: Quite often we don’t share our burdens with others ’cause we don’t want to or – at least I’ll, I’ll speak for myself – I don’t want to burden them. But what I’ve done is I’ve actually short-circuited growing in intimacy with them and in the blessing of them being able to bear my burdens as well. And I think that for me, feeling alone in, in that and feeling like people might not be able to understand has been one of the most difficult things.

JESSE EUBANKS: And when Chad did muster up the courage to share, people’s responses were oftentimes just plain odd. 

CHAD LEWIS: And I can’t tell you how many people lovingly, lovingly, have come up to me and they say, “Hey, my brother’s sister-in-law had chronic fatigue syndrome and they started taking zinc and they’re fine now. They ran a marathon last week. Have you tried iodine? You just rub iodine on your leg.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: It reminds me of, like, on Facebook when there’s, like, an article that comes out and it’s, like, “leading scientists are saying the following,” and then like Joe Schmo in the comment section is like, “Well, my cousin told me about this website that tells me that if you just do this one crazy thing,” and it’s just like, “Oh my gosh.”

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. But I, I do like that he uses the word lovingly because I – these people aren’t offering these suggestions to be mean or to be troublesome, like –

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, totally. Yeah. 

RACHEL SZABO: They’re genuinely concerned, and they really do wanna help. But yeah, sometimes our peer-to-peer relationships – they suffer when we try to be the solution. Again, here’s Mike Emlet. 

MIKE EMLET: Our impulse is to want to try to make things better or to fix things – “Well, I have an uncle who had back pain” or, or, “Uh, here’s, here’s a verse, you know, that should help you.” It increases the sense of isolation. So they already feel, uh, likely isolated from others. It’s a very isolating kind of thing in and of itself. Add to that, you know, brothers and sisters in Christ that might mishandle their suffering, but that isn’t necessarily what is needed in that moment. 

RACHEL SZABO: So when it comes to relationships with others, when you have a chronic illness, these relationships – they take on another level of complexity and vulnerability.

JESSE EUBANKS: Hold on. What if you’re not the person who has the chronic illness, but you’re the other person, like you’re somebody that’s in their community, somebody that knows them? How can you help navigate these things in a way that’s thoughtful and it’s not gonna do more harm? 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, that’s a good question. So in researching for this episode, we found three big themes over and over again about ways that you can help.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. Like what? What are they? 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so the first is talk to the person who has the chronic illness about something other than their illness. 

MIKE EMLET: It’s appropriate to move towards people with chronic pain and illness and, and ask how they’re doing. But if we only are focused on, you know, how, what was your last doctor visit like, things like that, in a way we can unwittingly contribute to this is all that matters about this person. I have a, a family member who has a, a chronic lung illness and she talks about the fact that that’s all people ever wanna know about how she’s doing, uh, as opposed to, “What was the last book you read that you really enjoyed?” or “What are your plans for vacation?” or something like that. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so first thing – talk to people about things other than their illness. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. Second thing is just listen, you know, without offering your opinions or your ideas or your solutions. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Yeah. Chad talked about that.

CHAD LEWIS: For the church, I think if we can get away from quick fixes where we’re trying to fix somebody, that if we can just listen and ask questions and empathize, that it will go so much further than trying to offer solutions. Sometimes it’s as simple for me as if someone says, “I’m really sorry, Chad, that you’re suffering with that. I’m really sorry.” That can be so life-giving. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so the first thing was talk about things other than the illness. 

RACHEL SZABO: Mm-hmm.

JESSE EUBANKS: Second thing was just learn to listen well without offering a bunch of opinions.

RACHEL SZABO: Mm-hmm.

JESSE EUBANKS: What’s the third thing? 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, the third thing is – if you want to offer help, try to make it specific. So, here’s Kate. 

KATE SMITH: “Can I bring you groceries over or can I make you a meal or can I help you do a load of laundry?” Because for me, if somebody just asks, like, “What can I do for you?” it feels overwhelming and I will say, “Nothing.” I will say, “Oh, I’m fine. You don’t need to do anything.” But if somebody says like, “Let me bring you over a meal,” or like, “Let me bring you over coffee,” that’s way more helpful than just an open statement. 

RACHEL SZABO: And she also said that genuine prayer is genuinely helpful too. 

KATE SMITH: Let them know that you’re praying for them. That is something that’s huge for me. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so that kind of leads us into the final relationship that we’re gonna take a look at. So we’ve looked at the impact on ourself, the impact on how we relate to others – but what about our relationship with God? Where is he in the midst of all of this? 

KATE SMITH: “Why, God, why are you doing this to me?”

JESSE EUBANKS: Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks. 

RACHEL SZABO: Rachel Szabo. Today – where the gospel meets chronic illness. 

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ve been going through the three primary relationships in life as we look at how chronic illness affects us. We’ve looked at our relationship to self and our relationship to others, and the final relationship is our relationship to God. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so going back to Kate. Kate has been a Christian for most of her life. So shortly after she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and her life started to turn upside down, she turned to God, mostly with questions. 

KATE SMITH: “Why, God, why are you doing this to me? This is so unfair. Why is this my struggle? Can’t something else be my struggle?” For a long time, that would be like one of my only prayers that I would pray, like, just to be healed from all pain, like mental pain, physical pain, all of it. 

RACHEL SZABO: In fact, many other people also prayed for Kate – family, fellow church members, pastors. But when it came to the request for healing, God always said no – or he seemed to say nothing at all. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, this goes back to that Facebook post that you referenced at the beginning of the episode, you know, where basically this person says, “There’s a cure for your illness, and his name is Jesus.” And it’s why so many people were upset because whether that person who wrote the post meant it or not, it does suggest a version of the gospel that can actually be really harmful. In fact, Chad brought it up in our conversation.

CHAD LEWIS: Well I don’t have enough faith, therefore God must not be pleased with me. And I think one of the greatest hindrances of the, of a true gospel is the prosperity gospel. 

RACHEL SZABO: Wait, so he’s saying prosperity gospel. I thought prosperity gospel was, “Hey, if you have enough faith, God will give you a bunch of money.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, that is one aspect of it, but it can also extend to, like, other types of success and prosperity. So it would say that God rewards your faith with wealth and health. 

RACHEL SZABO: Oh, okay. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Like both things. Yeah. So if you believe in God enough, you won’t be sick. And the inverse of that, of course, is if you are sick, then that’s on you because you don’t have enough faith. And Chad’s saying that this prosperity gospel – it is not good news, it’s false good news and can really be harmful to people who deal with illness on a regular basis.

RACHEL SZABO: Hence all the backlash that we saw on that Facebook post from people. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, totally. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, but then I look at someone like Kate who is suffering and she’s asking God to heal her and God is saying no and it’s like I still don’t know what to do with that. Like we know that God can heal. We know that God delights in doing good to us. So then why doesn’t he do it? Why are so many of his children walking around chronically ill and unhealed? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Rach, the, the answer is I don’t, I don’t know all the time. You know, like, this is – I mean, you’re asking like the ancient question of, like, how is there pain and suffering and evil in the world if God is good, and, um, it, that’s such a hard question. I mean, theologians have wrestled with it for thousands of years. Christians, normal people have been wrestling with that question, and I wrestle with that question. I, I don’t know. It’s, it’s probably not something I can answer in a sound bite in a podcast episode. Uh, I don’t know that I’ll ever have a satisfactory answer with my life, but Chad actually also has been thinking about that exact same question, uh, and, and here’s what he had to say. 

CHAD LEWIS: Let’s look at the garden of Gethsemane. Well if he’s sweating droplets of blood, that our Savior knows what it’s like to suffer, man of sorrows, he meets us in that place. He doesn’t say, “Stir up enough faith.” If it’s up to me to have enough faith do something, then I’m tapping out because it, my faith is a, it ebbs and flows just like the disciples. But the one in whom I have faith is constant, and that’s Jesus.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I mean, so Chad’s talking about, like, our good news isn’t a circumstance, it’s not my health, it’s not, uh, a good working body. The presence of a person named Jesus, like that’s my good news. And this Jesus can heal us, but he can also sit with us and he can empathize with our pain even when it isn’t healed.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I’ve been reading the book Walking With God Through Pain and Sufferingby Tim Keller, and in that book he talks about the unique perspective that we as Christians have to suffering. So like other world views would see suffering as something to just be avoided at all costs, do whatever you can to not suffer. Or it might see it as, “Oh, suffering is something you need to just grit your teeth through and you just need to accept it and deal with it.” But in our Christian faith, suffering actually has meaning. It has purpose to it. It’s not wasted. Again, here’s Mike Emlet. 

MIKE EMLET: What we most need to hear is, you know, the Lord saying, “I’m with you, child. You are my dear one. My love rests on you and I am with you in this suffering and I am at work.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Keller says that, um, trusting God means that I believe that if I knew everything that God knows that I would also look at the world around me and allow it to unfold as it is, like somehow there’s some master plan working here, but I don’t know that that’s always very comforting when I’m in a lot of pain.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: But it is true that what is comforting is somebody’s presence.

RACHEL SZABO: And that’s what God is offering. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Yeah. 

MIKE EMLET: Okay, I don’t understand what God is up to here, but I, I believe that he’s entered into the pain experience, uh, through, through the incarnation, through the cross, and, and resurrection and so I’m not alone in this.

JESSE EUBANKS: Earlier we mentioned the story of the bleeding woman in Mark chapter five. Her story actually does end in healing. We’re told that when she touched Jesus’s clothes, immediately the flow of blood dried up and she felt in her body that she was healed of her illness – complete healing after 12 years. It was amazing and we can rejoice at grand displays of God’s power, but Chad also brought up another story of suffering – and that one, that one has a different ending. In second Corinthians chapter 12, the apostle Paul was struck with something he called a thorn in the flesh – and we don’t know what it was, but it was clearly pretty painful. 

CHAD LEWIS: Paul asked three times that the thorn in the flesh be taken away, and Jesus said, “No, my, my grace is sufficient for you.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Jesus said, “No, I’m not gonna heal you right now, but I am here,” and that is something that Chad has taken great comfort in. 

CHAD LEWIS: And it was just this impression from the Lord that “Chad, if you never preach again, I’ve got you. If you never, never work again, you’re still my child. I’ve got you. I’ve got your family. You’re my precious son, Chad. I’m here.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Today, Chad is still able to do ministry, but he does have to pace himself and deal with the constraints of his physical body. 

CHAD LEWIS: Well if a 10 outta 10 was just like, “I feel normal,” uh, a one would be like, “I need to stay in bed,” um, I don’t know over the last 12 years if I’ve gotten above a five. So I’m always middle of the road, and I, I kind of hover around a three or four most days.

JESSE EUBANKS: But he knows who he belongs to, that he’s part of the family of God, and that helps him press on.

CHAD LEWIS: Zephaniah 3 – “I rejoice over you with singing. I not only love you. I like you. I chose you to be with me and my family for all eternity.” That’s beautiful.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, what about Kate? Where is she now? 

RACHEL SZABO: So Kate has bad days and she has better days and she does still sometimes wish her life looked different.

KATE SMITH: I’ve been sick for so long that, like, I really don’t know what it’s like to be healthy, so it’s hard to imagine. But I do, like, fantasize, like, “What would it be like to be a normal 28-year-old that’s able to live without pain and that has, like, a clear head? Like what would that be like?” 

RACHEL SZABO: But at the same time, she’s also been able to accept her illness as part of her story and learn to trust the God who’s with her and the God who’s writing that story.

KATE SMITH: I am Kate, and I have fibromyalgia and migraines and arthritis and mental illnesses, like that’s who I am. Before, I was at one point, like, really embarrassed to even, like, explain what it was. Now as an adult, I’m just like, “This is me and this is what I have and this is part of my story and who I am.”

JESSE EUBANKS: All throughout Scripture we see stories of God healing people physically. We know he can perform miracles. But then there are also times when he chooses not to, and the reality is we don’t always have a good answer for why God does what he does. But we do know that while it can be really hard to trust what he’s doing, we can always trust his character. So if you’re sick or in pain or exhausted, it doesn’t mean Jesus has forgotten about you. In fact, the opposite is true. The scriptures tell us that God is near the brokenhearted. So pray, ask for healing. It is a good desire to want a body not ravaged by the effects of a fallen world, and God is able to do miracles. But whatever the outcome, know that Jesus sees your pain and he’s with you in it. The God of the universe is by your side. He understands. And that is perhaps the greatest miracle of all.

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you benefited at all from this podcast, please help us out by leaving a review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Your review will help other people discover our show.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode – Kate Smith, Chad Lewis, and Mike Emlet. 

RACHEL SZABO: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Rachel Szabo, who’s also our producer and media director – and, despite her best efforts, she’s still trying to pass the SAT. 

CHAD LEWIS: I don’t know over the last 12 years if I’ve gotten above a five.

RACHEL SZABO: This episode was reported and written by Abby Shaffer. It was edited by the following Love Thy Neighborhood staff – Kiana Brown and Rachel Hamm. Anna Tran is our audio engineer. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. 

RACHEL SZABO: Apply for your social action internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or for a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”