faith unfaded

That’s the verse I keep repeating today. Isaiah 53:5. Every patient’s claim to healing.

I went to bed last night completely exhilarated. Weeks of illness and exhaustion were in my rearview, and I finally felt normal again.

Normal is utopia after a prolonged illness.

Then I woke up this morning.

I wasn’t back to square one, but I certainly no longer had the assurance I was in a full upswing.

I briefly got mad at myself for allowing hope to take root. I immediately rebuked that thought. Hope is the one certainty you have when life is filled with unanswered questions.

Maybe that hope was a gift from God to sustain me as I endure this struggle. A glimpse of what is to come… the victory that is not yet mine to hold, but has been promised to me.

I believe faith and modern medicine work in tandem, and I am relying on my doctors as well as the Great Physician as I navigate this baffling journey. I am also constantly trying to disentangle the physical, mental, and spiritual threads in an effort to intellectualize this away.

That’s both the power and the pitfall of a highly intuitive and aggressively overthinking mind.

I usually don’t like to write about trials until I’ve overcome them, preferring to have a joyful message. But I’m not at the end of this trial just yet.

Perhaps that is the message. You don’t have to know the answers to know Who holds them. You don’t have to feel okay to know that it IS okay. And even in illness, it is by His stripes that you are healed.