August marks two years since my chronic pain developed. Occasional headaches morphed into a series of chronic symptoms with no apparent cause. As I waded through what seemed like endless appointments, medical tests, and new symptoms, I desperately wanted healing. At times, I doubted whether the Lord heard my cries for help.
Especially for those who suffer from chronic, debilitating pain, prayer is an act of faith. Author and speaker Glenna Marshall knows this well. Informed by her journey with chronic illness and pain, Marshall wrote Praying in Pain: How to Know You’re Heard When You Haven’t Been Healed to encourage those who suffer silently. Through rich biblical exposition and personal testimony, Marshall shows readers how the Lord intimately understands our suffering and hears our every cry.
Prayer reorients our hearts toward the Lord, deepening our faith and refining our hearts. We can pray with confidence and boldness, knowing that the Lord delights to hear our every request and intimately knows our pain. Whether he heals us on this side of heaven or not, he’s ultimately preparing us for glory, where we’ll be free from pain forever.
The Lord Hears
Even when pain is excruciating and healing hasn’t arrived, we can’t allow our pain to drive a wedge between us and God. Last year, when my pain was at its worst, I had a particularly bad migraine that left me in bed. All I could do was muster a weak “Lord, help me.” Through tears, I asked to be healed.
Although my prayers were weak and my pain remained, I believe wholeheartedly that the Lord heard my cries. Weak faith is still faith, and as Marshall writes, we can “cry out for God to heal us because the act of coming to Him in desperation is working faith down into our bones, our aching bones” (62).
Prayer reorients our hearts toward the Lord, deepening our faith and refining our hearts.
Trying to function normally with chronic pain is exhausting. Suffering is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually depleting. Fatigue interferes with our ability to formulate complete thoughts, making prayer difficult. But this is when prayer is most important.
We need to pray amid suffering because it deepens our faith and increases our dependence on God. As Marshall observes, “Crying out reveals that even in [our] darkest hour of weakest faith, on some level [we] still believe He is able to do something about [our] pain” (26).
Through lament, which Marshall defines as a biblical complaint, we join a cloud of witnesses who have cried out to God in distress. Lament “allows us to voice our sorrows and griefs to God without staying there in the pit of despair” (21). Through pain, tears, and sleepless nights, we bring our burdens to the Lord and remind ourselves of His character: He is near, he holds us, and he understands our pain (Pss. 34:22; 120:1; 121; 139; 142:1; Isa. 53). He’ll also equip us with enough grace to endure the trial he entrusted to us.
Divine Love
Our pain isn’t a representation of God’s disdain or disappointment. Rather, the Lord allows our pain because he loves us and desires our personal holiness.
Paul suffered from a debilitating thorn, and he prayed fervently for the Lord to remove it. But the Lord chose to leave him in discomfort. Paul didn’t stop praying for healing because he doubted God’s power to heal. Instead, he chose to view his weakness as a cause for boasting in the Lord’s strength, not his own (2 Cor. 12:9–10). Paul’s thorn was a means for God’s particular grace and sanctification—and the same is true for us.
The pain we feel “is not arbitrary.” Marshall writes, “Rather, it is the tool God is using to make [us] like His Son” (149). Pain reveals our weaknesses, trains us for endurance, and refines our faith. As a fire does to metal, pain removes the impurities from our life, revealing our hearts and proving the genuineness of our faith (James 1:2–4; 1 Pet. 1:6–7).
Even when we may not see what the Lord is doing, we can trust his heart: He’s using our suffering for our good. Marshall argues, “If God has ordained suffering for us, whether for a season or for a lifetime, we must remember that He is entrusting us with something that can produce the fruit of righteousness in our lives while also declaring His faithfulness to those who see our suffering” (137).
Pain reveals our weaknesses, trains us for endurance, and refines our faith.
More than that, we also see God’s sufficient and particular grace toward us. The Lord knows the limited energy we have. He sees us curled up with an ice pack or heating pad. He sees us as we sit in the waiting room or the infusion chair.
As Marshall notes, “God’s present-tense grace gives us the internal fortitude to believe that if He does not heal our pain in this life, then He will give us what we need to endure pain in this life” (75, emphasis original). And although we might be tempted to borrow from tomorrow, we can trust that the Lord will give us enough strength to persevere through every moment of our trial.
Resurrection Hope
As our bodies weaken, our physical fragility directs our eyes toward heaven, where our faith will be made sight. One day, we “will shed this faulty frame and step into a new body” (166). While we’ll receive new bodies in heaven, that’s not our ultimate treasure—seeing Jesus is. Until then, our pain is a reminder that this world isn’t our home.
We can still pray for healing; in fact, we should, as Marshall writes. But if we aren’t healed on this side of heaven, we’ll be healed one day, and our temporal suffering is preparing us for that day (2 Cor. 4:16–18). Although we may weep now while uttering inaudible prayers, we’ll reap shouts of joy as we run into our Savior’s arms (Ps. 126).
Praying while physically suffering is an act of faith—one that all Christians can cultivate. In Praying in Pain, Glenna Marshall teaches Christians how to pray without ceasing, especially those suffering from chronic health conditions. Although the Lord hasn’t granted me full healing yet, prayer has deepened my dependence on and faith in the One who hears my every cry.
