When Your Body Becomes the Enemy

I want to tell you about something that happens to me now that never happened before.

I pull into a gas station. I turn off the engine. And before I open the door — I look around.

Not casually. Not the way you glance around before stepping out of a car.

I look around with the specific alertness of someone who has assessed that they might be a target. Because I feel like one.

My thoughts are not as quick as they used to be. The dialysis, the medications, the ten near-death experiences in a single year — they have done something to the sharpness I used to rely on. My mind is sometimes foggy in a way that frightens me because I cannot always trust what I remember or what I said or whether I locked the door or whether I am reading a situation correctly.

I move differently now. I lean forward slightly when I walk. The surgeries, the access procedures, the months of hospitalization — they have changed my gait, my pace, my presence.

And I know it. Which means I assume everyone else knows it too.

I drive a decent car. I would like to drive a nicer one — a Cadillac. A Genesis. The kind of car that represents the life I have built and the woman I still am inside.

But I hesitate.

I am on high alert in public now. My heart beats faster than it should. I am watchful in a way I was not before.

And I want to tell you: if you have felt this — if chronic illness has made you feel exposed in the world in ways you cannot fully explain to people who have not been through it — you are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. You are not weak.

You are navigating something real that nobody put in the patient handbook. This guide is for that.

There is a grief that comes with chronic illness that does not get named often enough.

It is the grief of your former physical self.

The woman who walked into rooms. Who moved through the world without calculating the distance from the car to the door. Who drove wherever she wanted in whatever car she chose without sitting at a gas station with her heart racing.

That woman had a physical confidence that came not from vanity but from capability.

Her body did what she asked it to do. She could trust it. She could count on it. It did not announce itself before she had a chance to speak.

You become more aware of being watched. More aware of how you appear. More aware of the gap between who you are on the inside — the woman with forty years of ministry, fifteen books, a lineage that ran toward the wounded at the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing — and what a stranger sees when they watch you walk from the car to the door.

They do not see what you know about yourself. They see the lean. The pace. The careful steps.

And you know they see it. Which makes you more watchful. Which raises your heart rate. Which makes every public space feel like a calculation rather than a destination.

This is real. This happens to more people navigating serious illness than will ever say it out loud. You are not alone in this.

There is a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with knowing you are being perceived differently than you used to be.

Before chronic illness, I walked into rooms with the confidence of a woman who had been preaching since she was twelve. A woman who had built ministries, written books, counseled leaders, and raised children. A woman whose presence preceded her introduction.

Now I walk into rooms aware that what people see first is not my résumé. It is my body. The lean. The pace. The careful steps.

That awareness changes how you move through the world. It makes you more watchful. It makes you calculate who is noticing what. It makes you wonder — in a way you never had to wonder before — whether you are being assessed as an easy mark.

The hypervigilance — the racing heart at the gas station, the constant scanning of surroundings, the decision to avoid certain places at certain times — these are not symptoms of a spiritual problem. They are the reasonable response of a woman who knows her body cannot defend itself the way it used to and is compensating with heightened awareness.

God gave you that instinct. The question is not whether you should be aware. The question is how you manage the awareness so it does not become the only thing you feel.

The apostle Paul knew something about living in a body that did not cooperate.

He called what he was dealing with "a thorn in the flesh" — and scholars have debated for centuries what exactly it was. A physical condition? A chronic illness? A disability acquired through persecution? We do not know the specifics. But we know his response to God about it, and we know God's response back.

Let me say this as plainly as I know how: God does not need your body to be strong for His power to be visible. In fact, the text suggests the opposite. His power is made perfect — complete, fully realized, undeniable — in weakness.

That does not mean your weakness is a punishment you must endure. It means your weakness is a platform God uses to display what only He can do. The gas station fear, the cognitive fog, the slower pace, the careful steps — none of it disqualifies you from being a vessel of God's power. In some way that is hard to hold onto when you feel exposed, it qualifies you.