not yet whole

finding calm, connection, and christ when chronic illness reshapes the person you thought you were

Photo by Steven Thompson on Unsplash

not yet whole

finding calm, connection, and christ when chronic illness
reshapes the person you thought you were

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learning with a limp

A few years ago, I would have told you that one of the most important qualities of a pastor is being a non-anxious presence.

I still believe that.

What I didn’t expect was how hard that would become to live.

For me, the test arrived through an autoimmune disease. The physical symptoms are difficult enough. The pain. The fatigue. The unpredictability of waking up each morning unsure of what kind of day your body will allow. But the deeper struggle has been the loss of capacity.

I can no longer do most things I once did without thinking. I can’t move at the same pace. I can’t sustain the same schedule. I can’t rely on my body the way I once could.

And if I’m honest, that loss has reached further than my calendar. It has reached into my sense of who I am.

For most of my life, I understood myself as someone who could help. Someone who could work 70 hours a week. Someone who never took a sick day. Someone who could work hard, care for people, and keep moving no matter what.

Now most days are about survival. Anxiety feels closer than peace. And I can’t fix broken things anymore, including myself.

This has created an uncomfortable question for someone whose whole vocation is helping other people find their footing:

How do you become a non-anxious presence when you are the one who is anxious?

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the leader we imagined

Most of us picture a non-anxious presence as someone untouched by fear. Unaffected by uncertainty. Calm while everyone else comes apart at the seams.

That’s not a real person. It’s a performance.

Even Jesus experienced distress. Even Jesus wept. Even Jesus asked his closest friends to stay awake with him in the garden, and they fell asleep anyway. The goal was never emotional numbness. The goal was presence. Staying grounded enough to remain with people in their difficulty without being swallowed by it.

That distinction has taken on a different weight for me since I got sick.

Some mornings I wake up anxious about what my health will do next. Some days I grieve the version of myself I used to be. Those feelings are real. Pretending otherwise has never made them smaller, only louder.

What I’m learning is the difference between feeling anxious and being led by anxiety. The feeling arrives. I don’t have to hand it the wheel.

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breathing before reacting

Anxiety rushes. It reacts before thinking. It imagines futures that haven’t happened and insists they require immediate action.

Healing, in my experience, almost always begins with a pause.

When I feel anxiety rising, I’ve started creating a small distance between myself and the feeling. Instead of saying I am anxious, I try to say anxiety is present. That may sound like a small shift. For me, it has become a way of staying myself.

Anxiety is something I experience. It is not who I am.

My diagnosis is something I carry. It is not my identity.

My limitations are real. They are not the whole story.

A simple prayer has helped when fear starts to spiral:

This feeling is real. This feeling is not all that is real. God is here too.

Some days that’s enough to take the next breath.

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knowing where you end

One of the most important things I’ve learned from family systems thinking is the idea of differentiation:

Knowing where I end and another person begins.

Pastors struggle with this. We care deeply. We listen. We walk alongside people through grief, illness, conflict, and loss. Over time it becomes easy to absorb the emotional weather around us. The congregation becomes anxious and we become anxious with them. Conflict appears and we feel responsible for resolving it before it gets worse. We start carrying weights that were never ours to pick up.

Differentiation invites something different. Stay connected. Love fully. Listen deeply. But don’t lose yourself in the process.

The older I get, the more I think this isn’t just a leadership skill. It is a spiritual practice. And chronic illness has been an unexpected teacher of it. When your body forces limits on you, you have to get honest about what you can actually hold and what you were never meant to carry in the first place.

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what I found in the limits

I can’t say illness has made me stronger. It has made me more aware of how fragile I actually am.

But something has been waiting inside the struggle that I didn’t expect.

For years I quietly tied my worth to my usefulness. Many pastors do. Many caregivers do. We spend our lives helping others and slowly start to believe that helping is who we are. Then life takes some of that capacity away, and we find out how much of our identity was built on performance.

Before I was useful, I was beloved. Before I accomplished anything, I was loved. Before I proved myself, God called me very good.

I’ve known that theologically for decades. Autoimmune disease has been teaching it to me in my body. There is a difference.

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the limp

I still want to be a non-anxious presence. I still believe the church needs people who can stay grounded when anxiety fills the room.

But I no longer imagine that person standing above the struggle. I imagine them walking through it, slowly, with a limp. (I have a limp due to muscle and joint pain).

Someone who knows fear but is not ruled by it. Someone who feels the weight but keeps showing up. Someone who has learned that God’s steadiness does not depend on ours.

I am not writing from the other side of the pain. I am writing from inside it.

A wounded healer doesn’t wait to be whole before showing up. They show up because they know what it is to need someone who stayed.

This is what I am trying to be. Some days I feel it more than others.

This is my calling.

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