Does faith make a difference when you are living with a chronic illness?

It is rare for people to talk about their faith, even as they seek help in learning to deal with their health issue. Some feel that if they share their faith, someone will slap them down. Other simple believe that it will start a fight over religious conceptions, if they bring the subject up. Having been slapped down a few time for sharing my faith. And having seen arguments start over difference in doctrinal and religious belief, I can't blame them. Personally, my faith is a big part of who I am. As well as a source of strength in deal with the reality of living with a chronic illness, and with having a stroke.

An Expert says : Faith Matters

Percy McCray, the director of the Pastoral Care Department at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Illinois and the founder of VALOR Faith Ministries in Illinois, said he has witnessed how patients with faith could recover faster than the ones without faith. McCray believes people can surpass the physical realities of chronic illness with faith.


"Without the faith factor," McCray said, "many of those people would be long dead and have given up hope because of what medicine and science and its limitations can say to people."


I have experienced first hand how faith plays a positive role in dealing with a chronic health issue, constructively. After nine months of endless test to find out why I could not keep food down, or was in such internal pain, hopeless invaded my soul. It did not help much that all the experts had a different opinion from my needing a psychiatrist, to telling me my problem was the result of being to fat, although I was not even considered obese. As a result, I fell into a world of hopelessness.


Websters dictionary describes Hopelessness “ when a moment or event breaks ones spirit or ones ability to function “, “a feeling associated with helplessness and/or loss “ With this overwhelming sense of hopelessness and my inability to see any light at the end of the tunnel of pain and misery I was in, I began to pray for death.


But God was not done with me yet as I heard a knock at the door. Standing their was a woman I knew from Woman’s Aglow. Her voice was soft as she told me she had been lead by the Lord to come and see me , although she had no idea why. I fell apart and shared my deepest fears and doubts with her, and in the process she share her own story of battling pain. A door was open in my heart and faith walked in.


I have been blessed with a strong faith in God that has helped me through a life long battle with the reality of having Lupus. As a result of my illness, I developed crohn's disease, and gastroparesis. Due to a car accident , I developed fibromyalgia. As the new year dawned 2013, I had a stroke. I can count myself as the only member of my family to ever have one. And the doctors could not find the cause. Nothing new there!

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1

• Hope is an unshakable confidence in God, despite one's circumstances.
• Hope is essential to a believer's faith.
• Hope gives strength, teaches patience and brings encouragement.
• Hope allows us to see that tomorrow things will be brighter.

Faith gives us hope and hope keeps is going.