Chronically Afflicted in a Post-Fall Body

can I please get a new earthly tent?

I can’t walk, I thought to myself.

I had just shimmied off of our chaise lounge after nursing our three-day-old son when sharp pain caught my footing and pulled me to the ground. I’d been limping my way through the latter half of my pregnancy, but that familiar jolt had intensified overnight and I couldn’t move half of my body without excruciating pain. I was like a mouse stuck in a sticky trap. The desperation of my circumstance began to set in. My ability to take care of myself, let alone my young children, had evaporated right before me.

Each night in that season, I slept in the same position as if someone held a taser to my hip—the slightest shift sending a shock wave to my side. When morning would come, I’d open my eyes, hoping that day would be different—that it would be the day I would walk again.

One morning, I stared at the sun shining through the curtains as our toddler ran by, asking, “Where’s mommy?”

I’m here buddy, I thought, unable to speak the words without weeping. Longing to run to him, I tried to lift myself but could only yelp from the pain. My husband found me with tears pooling in my ears and frustration building in my heart.

“Give me your hand,” he said. I begged him to leave me be, but he pulled me up anyway. I watched him, feeling the shame of my neediness as he rolled a walker over to the bed and carried my belongings to the couch. Once I pushed through sharp pains to sit, he placed our baby boy in my arms to nurse.

“Do you need anything else?” he asked.

“No,” I replied as I sipped lukewarm coffee.

My husband never once complained, but I did. I asked God how long. I asked him why on top of painful nursing, second-degree tears, no sleep, and baby blues did he allow this. I fought to hold on to hope, but as each day passed while I lived life from the couch, I felt the darkness of depression coming toward me as if to suffocate me with a pillow. Days turned to weeks, and physical therapy led to an MRI—and no one knew when I’d be able to walk.

My doctor’s best guess was that psoriatic arthritis was attacking my sacroiliac joint, causing inflammation and leaving me vulnerable to severe nerve pain. Pair this with a large needle inserted into your lower back and you have the potential for a bodily disaster. Even before that pregnancy, I began battling the chronic pain of this illness in many of my joints. Today, four years later, my pain has spread across my entire body. Not to mention the stomach pain which has gripped my intestines since I was 14. I have been chronically afflicted.

Maybe you understand how it feels to be tormented by pain or sickness day in and day out, for months to years to even decades. You’ve powered through years of migraines or Celiac disease. Your cancer has come back multiple times, despite chemotherapy. You feel the prick of your diabetes from regular insulin injections. All of our chronic illnesses may look different, but we all know what it’s like to be chronically afflicted. We all have wrestled with God and grappled with the “why” behind our pain.

Why does chronic illness exist?

If God created the human body and declared it good, why do these bodies battle constant sickness and pain?

Troubled to the Bone

Yaideliz Acevedo was 21 years old and 38 weeks pregnant when she first experienced symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis. The pain and stiffness in her hands became so extreme that she wasn’t able to snap onesies or secure diapers. Eventually she struggled to pick up her baby or feed him. Even as she underwent treatment for RA, she still said, “There’s not a day that goes by that I can say I’m 100 percent pain-free.”¹

Women walking through chronic illness know how it feels to rarely be without some level of pain or quantity of symptoms. A mother with Lupus feels deep chest pain as she tries to catch her breath after stopping her toddler from running toward the road. A college student with Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) finds daily fatigue a constant battle as she tries to keep up with her classwork.

Another woman groggily walks around her home with an ice pack on her forehead. She dreams of lying down and sleeping away the now three-day-long migraine pounding her head, but she has to take care of her children. Crohn’s disease has stolen part of a different woman’s intestines, leaving her with a colostomy bag to empty throughout the day. Attached to her abdomen is a constant reminder of her sickness, almost as if it’s repeating the refrain, “This world is not as it should be.”

Each and every day, I experience pain in my jaw, wrists, hands, hips, groin, stomach, thighs, back, shoulders, and neck. The pain level varies from mild to severe, but it is always there.

Can you relate?

We are people who have felt troubled to our very bones. We have experienced the frailty of our bodies. Like David, we cry out to God, “Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint; heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony” (Ps. 6:2). Our bodies often remind us that it wasn’t meant to be like this—these vessels in which we walk weren’t created for disease.

Photo by Navy Medicine on Unsplash

Good Bones

In the reality TV series, Good Bones, mother-daughter duo Karen E. Laine and Mina Starsiak Hawk partner together to bring to life homes that have nothing much to offer except “good bones.” Sometimes I wish I was like those strong-boned houses. Unfortunately, many who face chronic illness also face the deterioration of our bones, joints, and muscles. We don’t have good bones. But God created the whole human body to remain perfect and healthy forever—bones, muscles, nerves, organs, and all.

After God created Adam and Eve, he blessed them and “saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Every single part of our body was declared good in the beginning. Flaws didn’t exist and sickness and pain were unheard of. Skin diseases didn’t ravage faces and nerves didn’t misfire. Most astonishingly, death was untrue.

Psalm 139 shows us how, as image bearers of God, we were “fearfully and wonderfully made” by him in our mother’s womb (v. 14). In spite of the sin that seeps into our flesh and wreaks havoc on our frame, God has still declared these bodies he knitted together as good. This is not to say that bodily suffering is good—it is not how God intended, but a consequence of the fall of humanity. Yet our bodies are still good and necessary.

The Gnostics were a group of people in the second century who claimed the body was simply a prison cell for the divine soul. Scripture, however, teaches us that the whole person includes soul and body. Michael Horton explains it this way:

The soul is not divine, nor is the body demonic or evil; full humanity is a psychosomatic (body-soul) unity. We do not have a body (as if the soul were our real selves); we are created as psychosomatic (soul-body) whole, as persons. Our bodies (including our brain) and souls are not separate compartments, but interactive of our personal existence and activity.²

The whole person is part of God’s wonderful creation, made via the spoken word of God our Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, by the Spirit. Theologian Herman Bavinck beautifully described the creation of mankind when he wrote, “The body is not a prison, but a marvelous piece of art from the hand of God Almighty.”³ We cannot call what God has created bad; everything he made is good.

Yet it remains difficult to believe ourselves to be a “piece of art” given our sinfulness and the brokenness of our bodies. We may not feel like wonderful works but we have been created by a wonderful God, and in his image. Man is God’s great masterpiece, made simply for his own glory. God created our bodies and called them inherently good, but that goodness was tarnished on the day sin entered the world.

The Day Our Bodies Became Broken

I expanded my garden a this year to hold three times the amount of flowers. Over the last few years, I’ve discovered gardening to be one of the most life-giving hobbies. I’ve pondered the consequences of Adam and Eve a lot as I’ve put my hands into the soil of my own ground. I’ve waged war on spider mites, squirrels, disease, and vine-borers (but why do these exist?), coming face-to-face with the reality of man’s fall one pest at a time.

The effects of the fall are evident in my body, too, as I cultivate the earth. When I crouch down to pull weeds or plant seedlings, orthostatic leg pain screams at me to get up. Every time I stand, my vision goes dark for a few seconds and dizziness sets in. In the evening, ice packs are my close companions because simple yard work can sometimes leave me limping. When sin entered the world, it didn’t only infect the ground we work, but also the body in which we live. Every day my body cries out with the truth that something has broken it.

This isn’t what God intended. Like the time squash vine-borers chewed their way into every branch and stem of my zucchini plants, the day Adam and Eve listened to the lies of the serpent and disobeyed their Creator, sin took a bite out of everything (Gen. 3). When our splintered bodies cry out in pain and illness, they point us back to this day—this moment—when Adam and Eve sunk their teeth into forbidden fruit.

I wonder when Eve’s body first cried out. Was it during the increased pain as she birthed Cain or was it a twisted ankle? Did blood from her cut finger on new thorns seem to accuse her? Drops of red, whispers of, “What have you done?” Could she have endured some form of chronic illness as we do? We don’t have answers to these questions.

What we do know for certain is that one day her world that was once breathtakingly wonderful had turned into a world of fear and fractured bodies. Once upon a time they were safe, naked, and unashamed; now they were vulnerable, exposed, and shamed. They longed to be God-like, discontent with being merely made in his image, so they listened to the lies of the serpent and reached to grasp the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In allowing their inordinate desire for infinitude to take root, they sealed their finitude. Their bodies broke and the death clock started ticking.

Worse, the blame and shame of it fell upon their shoulders. The consequences of their sin also meant bodily exile from the presence of the Lord. They were no longer allowed to live in the garden where the tree of life stood:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Gen. 3:22–24)

No longer could they walk in the garden with God in the cool morning light. No more would they taste the fresh fruit of the trees from which they once picked. No longer would they live forever. As John W. Kleinig writes,

By its banishment from God’s presence, the body is diminished and doomed to die. Much of its beauty and splendor is lost. The body that was once fully alive becomes a “body of death” (Rom 7:24), a “mortal body” (Rom 8:11). The body that was once righteous becomes a “body of sin” (Rom. 6:6), “sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3). The body that was highly honored is now brought low (Phil 3:21). Yet, though beset by death, some of its former glory still appears, for a short while, when people are healthy and young. But it does not last and cannot last. It is like the beauty of wildflowers that blossom for a day before they fade ever so quickly away (Ps 103:15–16; Isa 40:6-7).⁴

And so, their days became numbered, their lives a mere breath. This is true of every man or woman born in Adam for, “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin…death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). It was as if we were there in the garden, eating what was not ours with the one who originally sinned. And we all receive the wages due us: death (Rom. 6:23).

We feel this brokenness in our bodies, hear about it on the news, and see it in our family members—our bodies have been corrupted with a sinful flesh. The goodness God intended when he created us has been twisted by sin. Bavinck explains, “Sin is not a substance in itself, but that sort of disturbance of all the gifts and energies given to man which makes them work in another direction, not towards God, but away from him.”⁵ In other words, sin is intangible—we cannot hold it in our hands, yet it clings to our flesh, turning us away from God and leading us to twist all the gifts we’ve been given to our own rebellious advantage. Sin also causes our physical bodies to rebel. As we’ve discovered, our bodies are good gifts given to us by a good God, but through the fall have been corrupted and disturbed, even to our very bones. In many ways, our bodies now work against God’s design. When sin entered the world, suffering entered our bodies.

It’s impossible to know exactly how Adam and Eve’s cells and genes functioned pre-fall. There were no scientists looking through microscopes at DNA. But we know that in Eden, the human body was made with a biological makeup that was unobstructed. In our modern day, we have studies and textbooks explaining the intricacies of our bodies.

God knew Adam and Eve would disobey him, ushering sin into the world. He knew sin would inflict our bodies, causing a whole host of problems. In his omniscience, he made our bodies with natural killer cells and the ability to make antibodies. He created white blood cells that play defense and the complement cascade (or complement system) which pops holes into harmful cells. Even before the fall, in kindness, our Creator provided safeguards built into our fragile frames so that we could survive the cruelty of a sin-inflicted world (for the length of the days he has planned for us). But even those safeguards can malfunction.

The cells in our body are constantly making copies of our genes. This is called DNA replication.⁶ Unfortunately, our cells can make mistakes. These mistakes alone are evidence of the fall. But God also provided mechanisms where cells correct their errors through processes like DNA proofreading, mismatch repair, and nucleotide excision repair. One doctor who studied molecular biology says, “These mechanisms work together to ensure the accuracy of DNA replication and protect the cell from potentially harmful mutations. They are a testament to the complexity and precision of cellular processes.”⁷ More than that, they are a testament to the complexity and precision of our Almighty God.

Even still, these mechanisms can fail in a ruptured world. This can eventually, over time, lead to gene mutations which can be passed down to our sons and daughters, to their children, and so on. Defected genes can also cause cancer (one of the top ten chronic diseases).

Chronic illness has a wide variety of causes. The very fact that there are so many chronic diseases displays just how greatly sin has seized our anatomy. In nearly every category of chronic illness, there can be both internal and external triggers. It would be an impossible task to flesh out every single mishap in the body that leads to an illness that persistently clings to us. Even within cancer alone, there are different causes. For example, skin cancer is usually caused by something outside of us (the sun), and lung cancer is often caused by smoking. Whereas many other cancers are brought on by an error in the DNA replication process that goes untouched by natural killer cells.

Autoimmune diseases show the brokenness of our post-fall body as well. The onset of an autoimmune disease can happen via internal factors like hormones or genetics, or external factors like viruses or environmental components. When someone battles one of these diseases, the very cells which were created to protect them from illness end up causing them to be ill. Our immune system becomes hijacked, causing natural killer cells or antibodies made by plasma cells to think everything is a threat and begin destroying cells that aren’t. Essentially, the body wages war on itself.

Yet, this doesn’t scratch the surface of what can go wrong in our bodies that paves the way to a chronic illness. Researchers have found that even childhood trauma can make a person more prone to developing a chronic disease as an adult. Those who have at least one chronic disease are three times more likely to have experienced traumatic events such as abuse or neglect as a child.⁸ I am one of these adults.

The congenital disease (intestinal malrotation) with which I’ve lived my entire life has no known cause. This is the case for many congenital diseases. It simply can’t be denied that sin has caused our bodies to cave in on themselves. Even aging, which we all experience, is a shortening—a breaking down—of our DNA strands.

Though every human lives out the truth of our finite, mortal bodies through colds and flus and sprained wrists, those of us with chronic illness experience the effects of the fall in our bodies on a deeper, sometimes all-encompassing level. While the average viral infection lasts around seven days, our illnesses go on for years—some of us, for a lifetime. We may never encounter remission while we navigate this earth.

Comfort for Post-Fall Bodies

All of this begs the question: If our bodies are afflicted because of sin, are our bodies still good? Our bodies are good because God created them. Yet our bodies are broken by the fall, and that brokenness is not good. Chronic pain and illness are not good.

Holding these two truths in hand, we can learn to both lament the way illness oppresses our bodies while also remaining grateful for the gift of a body, and the God who sustains it for all of our days. We can allow these truths to lift our eyes to our Savior in heaven who will one day return and grant us perfect bodies when he brings us home to glory.

Let the reality of your future glorification and your ever-present God act as a balm to your heart. Ponder it daily. When pain wraps around your wrists and thumbs as you pick up your baby, remember your coming glorification. When you’re sitting in yet another hospital bed, pray for God to comfort you with the certainty of your coming immortal body. Minute by minute, we must remember and run. Run to our God who is the steadfast God of all comfort whose promises are ever true.

When Eve believed the lie that God was holding out on her by withholding knowledge she desired, she changed the course of all of our lives with a single choice. When Adam allowed her to eat and then took a bite himself, he sealed the deal of our broken, mortal bodies.

Yet God has not left us without hope. God told Eve that one day her offspring would crush the serpent once and for all (v. 15). We know from other places in the Bible that this offspring is Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Gal. 3:16), the one who was born to be crucified in our place. As the apostle Peter said, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” Jesus bore our sin in his body. He took all the feelings of shame brought on by the weighty sins of every one of his sheep (Jn. 10:15). He endured bodily and spiritual suffering that we never will. Jesus’ body was the sacrifice in which the eternal consequences of our sin went to die. And he transferred his righteousness to us, as if we had perfectly obeyed the Father ourselves.

Our bodies, which God created for eternal perfection, are now subject to the reality of the brokenness of that perfection. As sufferers of chronic illness, we know this all too well. But we have hope in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We know that one day, our earthly tent will be raised with him. Our natural bodies will become spiritual bodies (1 Cor. 15:44). Here in the in-between, the wasting away of our bodies proceeds. But great comfort is found in this eternal truth: One day, we will trade in these tents, never to feel pain or illness again.

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1. Rachel Ellis “Meet Yaideliz Acevedo: Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis.” CreakyJoints, published on March 17 2021, accessed May 23 2024, https://creakyjoints.org/support/rheumatoid-arthritis-patient-story-yaideliz-acevedo/.

2. Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2013), 120.

3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 327.

4. John W. Kleinig, Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021) Kindle. 32.

5. Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion According to the Reformed Confession (Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 205.

6. News-Medical. 2019. “Mechanism of DNA Synthesis.” February 26, 2019. https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Mechanism-of-DNA-Synthesis.aspx.

7. “What Are the Mechanisms by Which Cells Correct DNA Replication Errors? | TutorChase.” n.d. https://www.tutorchase.com/answers/ib/biology/what-are-the-mechanisms-by-which-cells-correct-dna-replication-errors.

8. “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Chronic Diseases: Identifying a Cut-Point for ACE Scores.” 2023. National Library of Medicine, January. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20021651.