I write this from inside a real, sincere faith, not from outside looking in with resentment. I love the church. It has held me through some of the hardest seasons of my life, and I don’t say any of what follows to tear it down. But loving something honestly means being willing to name where it sometimes gets things wrong — and health, illness, and the body are places where I’ve watched well-meaning faith communities cause real harm without intending to.
In This Article
The Prosperity Gospel Problem
Somewhere in the drift of popular Christian culture, healing quietly became conditional. Enough faith, enough giving, enough righteousness — and the implicit promise is that resolution follows. When it doesn’t, the framework doesn’t examine itself. It looks instead at the person who didn’t get well and quietly wonders what they lacked.
That framing collapses the moment it meets real, permanent illness. It has to, because it was never built to hold what doesn’t resolve. A theology that only has language for breakthrough leaves nothing for the person still waiting on one, and it quietly implies — even when no one says it directly — that their continued suffering is evidence of some deficiency in them rather than simply being what a body with a chronic or permanent condition sometimes does.
The “Just Pray Harder” Response
This response usually comes from genuine love, not malice. Someone watches you suffer and offers the only tool their framework has given them: pray more, believe more, hold on tighter. It’s meant as encouragement.
Not only are you sick, but now you’re also responsible for not being well enough in spirit to be healed. That’s a heavy thing to hand someone who is already carrying more than enough.
What it actually communicates, to someone whose condition isn’t resolving, is that the outcome is a referendum on the adequacy of their faith. It adds a second burden on top of the first.
The Missing Theology of Lament
Most churches are far better equipped for celebration than for sitting with suffering that doesn’t resolve. Testimony services favor the breakthrough story. Worship sets skew toward triumph. There’s real value in all of that — but a community that only knows how to celebrate resolution has nothing to offer the person whose story hasn’t reached one yet, and may never.
Scripture itself models something different. An entire book of the Bible — Lamentations — exists to give suffering its own voice, unresolved, without rushing to a tidy conclusion. The Psalms are full of the same honesty: “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1–2, NASB). That’s not a psalm of triumph. It’s a psalm of someone still waiting, still asking, still faithful in the asking itself. A church that has room for Psalm 13 alongside Psalm 100 is a church equipped to walk with people through the whole of what real faith actually involves.
What Scripture Actually Says About the Body
The body-as-temple language gets invoked often, usually to encourage stewardship — care for what God has entrusted to you. That’s a good and true principle, and I’ve written more fully about what that stewardship actually looks like elsewhere. But it’s only half the picture, and the half that’s usually missing is just as scriptural.
Paul, describing a physical affliction he asked God three times to remove, was told something that never made it into the prosperity framework: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, NASB). That’s not a promise of removal. It’s a promise of sufficiency in the midst of what remains. And when suffering was near, the Psalmist’s confidence wasn’t that pain would be immediately reversed, but that “the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18, NASB) — nearness in the suffering, not necessarily an exit from it. Scripture holds both stewardship of the body and the reality of unresolved suffering. A theology that only teaches the first half isn’t more faithful to the text. It’s simply incomplete.
What Faithful Living in a Broken Body Actually Looks Like
In my own life, faithful living hasn’t looked like waiting for a resolution that hasn’t come. It’s looked like showing up anyway — praying without demanding a specific outcome as proof the prayer was heard, caring for my body because it’s worth caring for regardless of whether that care produces a cure, and trusting that presence and nearness are real even when the circumstances themselves don’t change. That’s not a lesser faith than the kind that expects breakthrough. It’s simply a faith built for the actual shape of a life that includes a permanent condition rather than one that assumes such conditions are always temporary detours.
Where This Leaves You
None of this is written to diminish real, sincere faith communities or the good they do — the church has been one of the steadiest sources of support in my own life, imperfect as any human institution is. It’s written because the people quietly carrying chronic or permanent illness inside those communities deserve a theology big enough to hold their actual experience, not just the version of faith that only makes sense when things resolve on schedule.
If you’re one of them — still waiting, still faithful, still finding your suffering doesn’t fit the testimony format your church seems built for — you’re not lacking. You may simply be living out a fuller, harder, more honest version of what Scripture actually teaches than the version most Sunday mornings have room for. I write more about what that ongoing, unresolved walk actually looks like day to day in From Disability to Healing: What’s Changed, What Hasn’t, and What I’ve Learned.
Disclaimer
Disclaimer
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