192. What Chronic Suffering Teaches About God | Sydney Bennett

Chronic suffering and faith in God collide in a way that most of us hope we never have to face, but today's guest has lived inside that collision for five years and come out the other side with a hope I found genuinely convicting. My guest today is Sydney Anne Bennett, a writer, disability advocate, and speaker who became disabled almost overnight two weeks after her honeymoon and was later diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder. She lives with daily seizures, chronic pain, and mobility loss, and she has built a community of over 300000 people by being honest about what it actually looks like to keep believing when your body will not cooperate and your prayers do not get answered the way you hoped. In this conversation we talk about what it means to lament honestly before God, how she learned to receive help from her husband Colton without feeling like a burden, and what she has learned about motherhood while raising her daughters Hadassah and Felicity from a wheelchair. I would love to know what stood out most to you, so leave a comment below and let me know, and if this conversation encourages you, please subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Sydney's story starts just after her wedding, when what began as unexplained pain escalated within weeks into paralysis, seizures, hallucinations, and loss of speech, with doctors telling her at one point that she was likely dying from a degenerating brain condition they could not identify. It took about a month before she finally received her diagnosis of Functional Neurological Disorder, a condition where the brain sends faulty signals to the body, causing symptoms that can shift drastically from day to day. Her husband was deployed just three months later, which meant she faced that first year of disability largely on her own, learning to use a wheelchair and manage seizures while still trying to finish school.

We spend a lot of this conversation talking honestly about what faith through chronic illness really looks like, not the version with a tidy resolution, but the version where you keep showing up to God in weakness, day after day, without knowing when or if healing will come. Sydney shares how a mentor taught her that raw, honest lament, the kind we see throughout the Psalms, is not a lack of faith but an act of it, and how that reframing changed the way she prays. We also talk about the difference between the theological answers to suffering she grew up with as a pastor's daughter and the much harder work of actually trusting God in suffering when she is living it herself. She is candid about ongoing struggles with depression and anxiety, about a current flare in her symptoms eight months postpartum, and about learning to respond to fear more quickly instead of spiraling into it. Toward the end we talk about marriage, motherhood, and what it has meant for her to graciously receive her husband's help, and to redefine what being a good mother looks like from a wheelchair, raising her two young daughters with honesty, humor, and hope in Jesus.

Find more from Sydney: the.annegirl (@the.annegirl) • Instagram photos and videos: https://www.instagram.com/the.annegirl/?hl=en the.annegirl - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@the.annegirl/videos Sydney Anne Bennett: http://www.sydneyannebennett.com Connect with me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tammy.m.peterson Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TammyPetersonPodcast TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tammypetersonpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tammy1Peterson Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/TammyPetersonPodcast