"God gave me this sickness to teach me something. He's using this to build my character."
How it sounds in your head: People at church keep saying 'God has a purpose for this' and 'He's teaching you patience.' My Sunday school teacher said God sometimes makes us sick to get our attention. If that's true, then asking for healing is like asking to skip the lesson God wants me to learn.
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning."
-- James 1:17Religious teaching that makes God the author of sickness - turns Father into cosmic abuser who hurts His children 'for their own good.'
Well-meaning adults use this explanation to make sense of his suffering, and questioning it feels like questioning God Himself. Scripture about 'all things work together for good' gets twisted to mean God causes the bad things.
Disciples asked 'who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' - assuming God caused it as punishment. Jesus said 'NEITHER' - then IMMEDIATELY healed him. Jesus didn't lecture him or make him wait to learn a lesson. He healed him on the SPOT to display God's works.
I REFUSE the lie that God gave me this sickness! IT IS WRITTEN: Every GOOD and PERFECT gift comes from the Father - sickness is neither good nor perfect, so it's NOT from Him! Jesus came to give me LIFE abundantly, and the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Sickness is from the THIEF, not my Father! IT IS WRITTEN: Jesus healed ALL who were oppressed by the devil - that means sickness is OPPRESSION, not education! God is a good Father who gives GOOD gifts, and healing is the children's bread!
Your Father isn't standing back with a cosmic lesson plan watching you suffer until you learn something - He's the Father who RAN to the prodigal who'd been eating with pigs and threw a party WITHOUT ONE LECTURE. He doesn't teach through sickness any more than He teaches through sin. He teaches through His goodness.