God Is in the Dialysis Chair With You

I remember the first time I sat down in that chair.

The nurse connected the lines. The machine began to hum. And I sat there — three hours stretching out in front of me like a long, quiet road — and I thought: Where are you, God? Are you even in this room?

If you've sat in a dialysis chair, you know that feeling. The waiting. The watching the clock. The strange mix of gratitude that the machine is keeping you alive and grief that you need it to. It is one of the loneliest feelings in the world, even when the room is full of other patients and nurses and the low hum of machines doing their work.

But here is what I have come to know with everything in me: God is in that chair with you.

One of the most dangerous lies chronic illness whispers is that God has stepped back — that He is watching from a distance, unmoved, while you suffer. The enemy uses our pain to plant seeds of doubt about God's presence, His care, His attention.

But Scripture tells a different story.

The dialysis chair is not beyond His reach. The treatment room is not outside His presence. There is no place — no hospital, no clinic, no home treatment setup — where God is not already there, waiting for you.

Throughout Scripture, God has a pattern: He shows up in the hard places. He met Hagar in the wilderness when she was alone and desperate. He met Elijah under the broom tree when he was exhausted and wanted to die. He met the disciples in the middle of a storm on the water.

He did not wait for them to get to a comfortable place before He showed up. He came to them in the middle of it.

He will come to you in the middle of it too.

Three hours is a long time to sit with your thoughts. I know. And sometimes those thoughts get dark — the fear, the uncertainty, the questions that don't have easy answers. Here are a few things that helped me in the chair:

Talk to Him honestly. You don't have to pray polished prayers in the dialysis center. God can handle your raw, unfiltered heart. Tell Him you're scared. Tell Him you're tired. Tell Him you don't understand. He already knows — but there is something powerful about saying it out loud to Him.

Bring a scripture. Pick one verse before you go in. Write it on a card. Let it be your anchor for those hours. When your mind starts to spiral, come back to that one verse. Let it be a rope you hold onto.

Look for Him in the small things. The nurse who is gentle. The sunlight coming through the window. The fact that your heart is still beating. God's presence often comes in small, quiet ways — not in the dramatic, but in the tender.

Let yourself rest. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do in the chair is simply rest. You don't have to be productive. You don't have to be strong. You can just be still, and let God be God.

If you are reading this from a dialysis chair right now — or from a couch recovering from a treatment — I want you to hear this:

You are not forgotten. You are not abandoned. You are not too broken for God to be near.

He sees every needle stick. He knows every hour you've sat in that chair. He counts every tear you've cried in the car on the way home. And He is not unmoved by any of it.

You are His. And He is with you — in the chair, in the waiting, in the long and hard and holy work of staying alive.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

If you're walking through dialysis and looking for support that goes beyond the physical, I'd love to talk. Book a free discovery call — no commitment, just a conversation between two warriors.