In a recent (February 2023) Christianity Today post, award-winning Christian writer Philip Yancey revealed that he has Parkinson’s disease. You can read the entire post on the link below.1 Parkinson’s is a degenerative neurological condition that interferes with muscle-brain connections and hampers walking, talking, and a host of other simple tasks that we so often take for granted.
Yancey is well known for his books on dealing with pain and suffering. According to Yancey: “I’ve spent years writing about pain and suffering. Now I’ll spend years learning how to live with physical disability.”2 In this very touching Christianity Today article Yancey relates how his older brother Marshall, a brilliant man with incredible gifts of music, one day was perfectly normal while the next day his whole world changed forever. As Yancey shares: “Everything changed in 2009 when a stroke cut off blood flow to his brain. One day he was playing golf; two days later he lay in an ICU ward, comatose. Only a rare type of brain surgery saved Marshall’s life, and thus began his new identity as a disabled person. In a reprise of childhood, it took him a year to learn to walk and more years to speak sentences longer than a few words.”3
In an early book that Yancey co-authored with Dr. Paul Brand called Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants, he shares how pain can often be a blessing because, while nobody wants it, pain serves as the body’s built-in warning system that screams something is wrong and needs to be fixed. In this same vain sickness can also be viewed as a gift if we understand that God will use it for His glory if we only let Him. For example, I am reminded of the man born blind from birth in (John 9). When His discipled asked Jesus: “…Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2), Jesus shared this incredible reply: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” (John 9:3). You see God showed His great power and mercy by restoring sight to this blind man. And through this incident Jesus was glorified.
And on a personal note, as some of you may be aware I suffered back in 2003-2004 from an 18-month long bout of severe clinical depression. While I never grew bitter over this severe illness I often asked God why me. Thankfully through the right medication I was completely restored to perfect health and I have been depression free for sixteen years. Two things stand out for me about my experience with depression. First, I thank God every day for His deliverance and restoration because many people with my same condition continue to suffer or are OK one day and bad the next. And second, through my past work as a counselor at the NYC based Bowery Mission, I have been able to minister to many men with depression.
But some may say what about the cases where no healing comes? As an example, consider the case of Joni Eareckson Tada. The year was 1967 and a young 17 year-old teenager named Joni was out having fun with her friends. While swimming she dove into a lake and misjudged how shallow it really was. As a result, she broke her neck, paralyzing her body from the neck down. As a quadriplegic Joni felt that her life was over and she struggled that first year, during a period of intense rehabilitation, with suicidal thoughts, major depression, and with God. Fast forward to today and we see that God has used Joni in amazing ways as a worldwide ambassador and champion for handicapped individuals for over fifty years. While Joni often prayed for healing I believe that God felt He could use her far more effectively, in her wheelchair, for His glory – and He has. And oh yes, Joni has absolutely no doubt that her healing will one day come when she gets her new glorified body in heaven.
You see God chooses certain people and gives them the gift of sickness not because He wants then to suffer, but because He has special plans to use them to bring glory to His name. My friends, I believe with all my heart that God is a good God, and if He allows sickness to hit us, He plans to use it in some special way to bless others and glorify His name. No one wants sickness but if we realize that God can still use us no matter the sickness to touch lives and glorify His name then in the scheme of eternity we should count it a blessing because we know that God will work all things (including sickness) for good to those who love and trust Him.
And coming back to Philip Yancey, I love his take on his new disease. May the following quote let all of us realize the importance of perspective: “And though Parkinson’s may eliminate some of my favorite physical activities, I can enjoy others that a quadriplegic may envy.”4
Finally, in the last analysis, we all have a terminal illness that one day will cause us to die. It’s cause and name is sin. And we are all under the physical curse of death. But praise God for those of us who know Jesus, while our physical bodies are decaying with age, this condition is only temporary because one day when we die, we will wake up in the presence of the Lord!
1 Parkinson’s—The Gift I Didn’t Want | Christianity Today
2 Parkinson’s—The Gift I Didn’t Want | Christianity Today
Thank you for this ! Perfect timing ….