The body’s complaints weigh heavily, especially when far from kin and native land. But remember what was said to Timothy, that beloved son: attend to your bodily health, for teachers and all the faithful stand in need of such mercy. You do well to seek the counsel of physicians, for the Lord gave herbs and skills for our healing, and it is no betrayal of faith to use them. Yet do not let the remedies of the body make you forget the true source of health. The same God who sends the healer also shapes the trial. The dizziness and fog that cloud your mind after midday, these too are measured by His hand. For as the poor man Lazarus had his sores, and the rich man his table, these things are not tokens of God’s favor or disfavor. True wealth is not in ease, but in a soul that needs nothing from the world. Your isolation is not poverty; it is a workshop for faith.
Consider how Peter slept bound in prison, between guards, his body confined but his heart so free that he did not even know the miracle until it was past. The angel came, the chains fell, the iron gate opened of its own accord, and he walked through the city while his friends prayed, not knowing what God was already doing. So it is with you. The symptoms rise, the mind grows heavy, and you cannot trace the cause. But while you are yet asking, God is already caring for you. He who died and rose again to be Lord of both the dead and the living, will He neglect you now that you are His? He paid for your salvation not with silver, but with His own blood. No mother so clings to her child as He clings to your soul. He has not brought you to this foreign place to abandon you in it. The very distress you feel after eating is a call to lean harder on Him, to discover that His strength is made perfect in weakness. You are learning what the faithful centurion knew: that we are not worthy, yet mercy comes anyway.
You ask what these things could be, and your mind searches for an explanation. But there are matters that transcend such reasoning. The world’s wisdom would have you dissect every sensation and predict every outcome, but salvation does not come that way. God chose what the world calls foolish to shame the wise. The physician will watch your course over these months, and that is prudent. But faith does not need to see the whole road, only the next step. Whether you are at home or abroad, beautiful or worn by years, the sun and the air and the fruits of the earth come from the same hand, and that hand is beneath your head even now. The body may grow weak, but that weakness strips away the illusion that we are our own security. The rich man who needs nothing is truly poor; the one who bears her light affliction with her eyes on the kingdom is wealthy beyond measure.
Do not, then, let this trial make you of the number of His enemies, murmuring or despairing as though God were far off. The carnal mind resists when it cannot understand. But you are called to rest like Peter in his chains. When the deliverance comes, you will look back and find that you were carried through gates you never saw opening. Until then, let each bout of dizziness become a prayer, each hard drive home a hymn sung in the night. He who noted the fall of every sparrow is not aloof from your small room. The same care that set you in this foreign land will bring you safely through it and, in time, home.
