When God Meets Us in the Wilderness of Chronic Illness

Oh the pain of being misunderstood, ignored, disbelieved! Heather Riggleman walks us forward.

Elisa

When God Meets Us in the Wilderness of Chronic Illness

By Heather Riggleman

For years, I was misunderstood and quietly dismissed. I sat in sterile exam rooms, trying to explain why my body felt foreign—why breathing was hard, why exhaustion pressed heavy on my chest like an unrelenting weight. Doctors furrowed their brows, flipped through charts, and left me with phrases like, “Maybe it’s just anxiety. Women your age often feel this way.”

But it wasn’t “just anxiety.”

I nearly died because my symptoms didn’t fit neatly into medical textbooks. For years, I carried the ache of not being believed, of being treated as fragile, of hearing the unspoken accusation: This is in your head. Until one doctor finally looked beyond the confusion, beyond the clinical bias, beyond the dismissal—and at age 43, a pacemaker was placed into my chest. And I exhaled for what felt like the first time in years.

This is the wilderness of chronic illness.

Recovery is its own strange landscape. For years, I shaped my days around what was possible—not what I longed for, but what my body could hold.

I learned to adapt. To measure the weight of laundry baskets against the energy it would steal. To weigh whether standing at the stove would be worth the dizziness it might bring. The runner who once laced up for marathons became the woman who calculated when the dishes would cost the least—not in money, but in energy.

This is the math of chronic illness: a life reduced to what fits inside the borders of pain.

And yet—sometimes mercy slips in quietly, like morning light under a heavy curtain. Treatment comes. Insurance finally approves. A procedure opens the door that seemed to be locked forever. And the body that had forgotten how to rise remembers again.

Now, I find myself tackling my child in the backyard, barefoot on sun-warmed boards. I wake without a battle plan to simply make it to noon. I inhale deeply, and the air feels like gift, not weight.

And those scars—the ones I trace absentmindedly while standing at the mirror—are not disfigurements. They are altars. They tell the story of survival, of resilience, of a God who still resurrects life in places that seemed finished.

The girl who was lost is not gone. She is becoming— 

a new kind of beautiful, 

a new kind of strong.

For every woman who has been misunderstood in her pain, overlooked in her symptoms, dismissed in her suffering—your story matters. You are not invisible to God. He sees the nights you’ve wept in frustration, the appointments where you’ve left unheard, the strength it takes just to keep going.

“The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.” — Psalm 41:3

Your scars are proof: you are still here. And sometimes, being here—breathing, enduring, rising again—is the strength the world most needs to see.

Heather Riggleman is a writer, storyteller, and occasional cat-herder—though her three ginger cats insist on calling themselves her entourage around the homestead. Most days, you’ll find her sharing faith-filled reflections and real-life grit on her Facebook page, Growing Boldly with Heather Riggleman, where she reminds women that God’s love can be found in both the holy moments and the messy, ordinary ones. Heather has been known to sip her coffee a little too strong, pray a little too desperate, and laugh at herself when life doesn’t go as planned (which is most of the time). She’s passionate about connecting with women who are navigating hard seasons, reminding them that faith often grows deepest in rocky soil. When she’s not writing with cats sprawled across her keyboard, she’s learning how to live slower, love bigger, and keep saying yes to God’s quiet invitations. You can connect with Heather at HeatherRiggleman.com