Tips for Chronic Illness Sufferers

As an arthritis sufferer for most of my life, I was particularly pleased to be a contributor to a new e-book, Chronic Illness Tips: 263 Ways to Do More Than Just Get By. 

The 80-page book is available free to anyone who signs up for daily updates from the web site invisibleillnessweek.com. National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week is September 13-19, 2010.

Over 20 contributors share their best tips to live successfully with chronic illness on a variety of topic. "These experts are people who have the credentials," says author Lisa Copen, founder of Invisible Illness week, "but more importantly, they have experienced illness themselves or health issues of someone close to them. Their tips come from the experience of living with the challenges illness gives us."

The chapters include coping tools, relationship issues, career, faith, and practical tips, from traveling with an illness to homeschooling. There are also many tips on how to encourage someone who lives with a chronic illness.

With nearly 1 in 2 people living with a chronic condition, about 96 percent of those people are suffering silently with invisible illnesses.

How Do You Know When You're Lost?

How far do you think you might travel in the wrong direction without realizing it? A Pennsylvania driver recently made it 10 miles west in the eastbound lanes Route 283. A Mississippi driver made it some 15 miles south in the northbound lanes of I-59.

Clearly, you don't have to know you are on the wrong track in order to be lost.

On a highway there are plenty of sings that should indicate whether you are traveling in the right direction. Is the same true in life?

What "signs" does God give you to know that your life is headed in the right direction? And how do you know when you are lost?

Connect: Worship Is not Enough

Worship is not enough.

Even good worship. Even the best worship. It’s not enough to develop you into a fully mature person of God. It wasn’t meant to.

That’s because worship is primarily a vertical connection. It connects us to God. While we do this with others—we sing together, greet one another, and pray for people—our primary aim is to praise God and hear from his Word.

You need more. We all do. We are created to have meaningful relationships with each other. As believers in Christ, this is not just a nice idea; it's necessary for our survival. As John Wesley put it, “There is no such thing as a solitary Christian.”

That is the reason behind Connect. It is a venue for growing together in the faith. You meet with a smaller group of people so you can see one another face to face, hear the questions they ask about Scripture, pray for individuals by name. You talk. Listen. Pray. You grow. Connect majors on the horizontal dimension in our lives. We will also connect with God through prayer and the Word, but our relationships with each other will be primary.

Worship and Connect. Vertical and horizontal. God and others. You need both.

Connect begins Sept. 12, 11:15 a.m.

What Would You Do?

The television program Primetime: What Would You Do? stages hidden-camera experiments in which average people are confronted with awkward social situations in order to see how they’ll respond.

In this week’s edition, people were reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan, then sent off to a television audition in another building. Along the way, they encountered a person in obvious need of assistance. The point of the experiment was to see if hearing the biblical story would prompt people to respond.

Here's the twist. Some of the participants were told that they were already late for their audition and had to hurry. The others were told that they had a few minutes to spare.

Only 35 percent of those who were in a hurry stopped to help, compared to 80 percent of the others.

Before concluding that you would respond differently, consider this. This program mimicked a well-known experiment conducted among seminary students at Princeton in the 1970s, and the results were nearly identical. People in a hurry are much less likely to help others, regardless of their level of faith.

The more we think about ourselves, the less open we are to others.

Saying that is a little like discussing the forecast--everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything to change it.  The real question is how we can change the climate in our culture (and ourselves) so that we are less focused on our own lives and more open to others?

 How do we create a sense of community in a society which places its highest value on individual gratification?