Emma Kitchen reflects on how life with Severe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, though invisible and isolating, became the unexpected place where she encountered God most intimately. Far from the world’s definitions of success, she reveals the quiet richness found in stillness, surrender, and divine presence.
I begin each day not by rising, but by listening. I hear the quiet stir of the world moving on without me, cars pulling out of driveways, neighbours heading to work, lives being lived. Meanwhile, I remain in bed, caught in standstill time, my limbs heavy with the strange, relentless weight of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I hear my elderly mother’s footsteps on the landing. She’s preparing for another day of caring for me. I feel a familiar guilt as I listen to her boil the kettle. This isn’t the retirement she dreamed of.
Lying here in the quiet, I take inventory of what my life has become.
And this isn’t the life I dreamed of either. Lying here in the quiet, I take inventory of what my life has become.
By any measure society values, I am missing it all, the career milestones, the mortgage, the marriage, the savings account that signals a life well-lived. My friends drifted away, not from cruelty, but because when your life disappears, so do the conversations that hold relationships together.
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My youth has all but gone. My hair is turning grey. My muscles have wasted from years of enforced stillness. In the eyes of the world, I am a spectacular failure.
I measure energy like a miser counts coins. A teacup’s weight can be too much. Stairs become Everest, climbed on all fours. Speaking often demands more fuel than my body can provide.
Unable to work for over a decade, I rely on my mother and disability benefit. Most days, I lie silent and still, unable to do more than exist. And yet, this no longer feels like suffering. Because something has shifted.
Where I once saw failure, I now see a different kind of success
Where I once saw failure, I now see a different kind of success, the success of finally being present to my own life and the beauty that remains.
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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for all its cruelty, became my unexpected teacher. Like a forced meditation, the monastery came to me. It stripped me of everything I thought I needed to be, independent, productive, a “somebody”, and sent me inward to kneel at God’s feet.
There, in the hush between grief and grace, I discovered something extraordinary. The Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t something I had to earn. It had been within me all along, waiting beneath the noise and clamour of the world.
A quiet joy emerged. Unearned, inexplicable. A vitality threading through everything, even in a body too ill to sit upright. I found holiness in the miracle of breath, when breathing was all I could manage. I heard the sacred rhythm of rain against the window. I wept at birdsong.
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This transformation didn’t come from striving. It came when I stopped. When I surrendered to the pain, the loss, the stillness. When I let go of what I wanted and opened to what God was offering. My mother makes my meals because I cannot. I lie down from morning to night. To others, this looks like failure. But in this stillness I’ve found something unshakable. I no longer see illness as punishment, it’s become my path to salvation by giving me exactly what I needed.
The world may see a middle-aged woman who never quite launched. But God, I believe, sees his daughter returned. Stillness and surrender became the living altar, the home of God within me.
I’ve learned the greatest journey happens when I stop fighting this moment. When I stop moving entirely and bow to the intelligence of God. And now, even with nothing to show for it, I’m richer than most.
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