1 Corinthians 9:24-27 PHILLIPS Do you remember how, on a racing-track, every competitor runs, but only one wins the prize? Well, you ought to run with your minds fixed on winning the prize! Every competitor in athletic events goes into serious training. Athletes will take tremendous pains—for a fading crown of leaves. But our contest is for an eternal crown that will never fade. I run the race then with determination. I am no shadow-boxer, I really fight! I am my body’s sternest master, for fear that when I have preached to others I should myself be disqualified.
Dear Sarah,
You’re learning the hard way that chronic illness doesn’t take vacations or weekends away. It always demands attention and adjustment while requiring you to keep a tight hold onto your attitude and aspirations. (All. The. Time.)
Chronic illness isn’t just visiting and sleeping nights on your couch; it’s taken over all the rooms of your life.
Chronic illness hasn’t just moved into your guest room; it’s brought unwelcome friends in diagnoses, difficulties, and deliberations which now reside where dreams and destiny used to live. And the life we knew before has moved out without leaving a forwarding address.
Nothing but dust remains in the closets and corners.
Yet you have the choice to see this dust as leftovers or as loving. You choose either leftovers from a life gone or you choose to love God and others from the life that has been given. From personal experience, the second choice is the one that gives hope and the one that brings joy for strength. Also, from personal experience, this choice is one that must be renewed, every single day. There’s no vacations from this choice.
Yet there’s one new room in the house of your heart now. An exercise room that should be used daily and with determination. This is because you’re now enrolled in a specialized training program. A program with the purpose of training your body. You’re not training for your bodily health, but for shalom – the wholeness that comes from life with our Jesus, the hope of glory alive in you and me, for now and forever (see 1 Corinthians 1:20).
Shalom is fuller and richer than our word for peace. It encompasses abundance and completeness in an overflowing ripeness of joy. On our best days in the before all of this with chronic illness, we glimpsed it in that perfect moment. And now, we dream of it through most of our days.
But no matter what our days look like, Scripture tells us this – Look for peace and work for it (Psalm 34:14b GNT). Other versions of this verse say to strive for it with all your heart and pursue it. Whatever the version, the idea remains the same – to run hard after shalom/peace with everything we’ve got. And this kind of running after peace in chronic illness requires training like an athlete using an exercise room…
I must do that repeated exercise of taking dark and despairing thoughts captive as unto Christ to help strengthen the muscles of my will and my mind. I must do the repeated choice of choosing hope in and for my heart when everything in me is screaming for relief and release. These choices can and will strengthen me and others in the doing. Just like a weight-lifting or distance running regime, these choices will shape my life more into the Image of Christ. And trust me, there’s nothing worth comparing with that! Moving into this kind of mindset produces a perspective of peace like none other. It transforms this 24-seconds, minutes, or hours of what I never wanted into another day closer to heaven.
Only Jesus can make all of this pain, loss, and grief into shalom. And He will, dear Sarah, He will! He will do this and more if you will hold hard to the hem of His robe and let yourself be strengthened in the calm you find there…
Much love from your friend,
Beth
written by and copyrighted to Beth Madison, Ph.D., 2023.
Soul Scientist 
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