When It's Hard · Illness & Caregiving
Chronic Illness & Pain
For when you feel: chronic pain, always sick, my body is failing, invisible illness
For which cause we faint not: but though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation worketh for us above measure, exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.
The MinuteHomily
You wake and take inventory before your feet touch the floor, because the body reports in early now. Paul carried a thorn that never left him, and he refused to pretend otherwise. The outward man is perishing, he admits, through the flares and the fatigue and the quiet grief of what you used to do. Then he says something wilder: "the inward man is renewed day by day," on a supply no lab result can interrupt. And the affliction he dares to call light is light only beside what it is producing, "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." Your pain is not wasted mass. In God's hands it is being converted. Receive today's renewal, and let glory hold the horizon.
By the MinuteHomily editors
A prayer for this moment
Lord, my body is tired of being a battlefield. Renew my inner self today, just today, and let none of this pain be wasted in Your hands. Amen.
“Suffering borne with love ceases to be suffering and is changed into joy.”
after St. Thérèse of Lisieux
Hymns for this moment
“Be Still, My Soul” · Katharina von Schlegel
“I Am the Bread of Life” · Suzanne Toolan
resurrection promise for failing bodies
One small step
Receive today's renewal: five minutes of Scripture before symptoms set the agenda.
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