Rick Warren, who recently retired as founding pastor of Saddleback Church, revealed this week that he has been battling an autoimmune disease for two years.
“It leaves all my major muscles in pain, pretty much 24 hours a day,” he said. “It’s debilitating. It’s tough walking and working. But it hasn’t changed the way that I think. The problem is sometimes I feel like I am this brain on fire, and I’m like in a wheelchair. I’m not in a wheelchair, but the bottom line is it’s difficult to move around.”
Warren’s condition has not deterred him from his current ministry objective, leading the Finishing the Task Coalition. The project aims to fulfill Jesus’s call to make disciples of all nations by mobilizing the global church to ensure everyone has access to God’s word.
“I do believe, as scripture says, my times are in his hands,” Warren said. “And I want to be directly at the center of the will of God. I don’t want to get ahead of his will; I don’t want to get behind his will. But I want to be at the pace that he wants.”
He described the pain caused by his disease as “brutal.”
“Sometimes in the morning, I can’t tear open a packet of sugar or turn the pepper shaker, my hands are so tight,” Warren said. “When I first took this role that God was calling me to lead the Finishing the Task Coalition, I thought it made sense that God would call me to do this, because I’m not afraid of complexity. But when I began to look and see how difficult it was with the pain I’ve been going through, I realized God said, ‘I didn’t choose you for your experience. I didn’t choose you for your years of skills that you’ve developed. I chose you because I knew you would trust me even in pain.”
Warren wrote a new book titled “Created to Dream,” which walks readers through God’s process for helping people fulfill their dreams. He related the subject of the book to his present circumstances, emphasizing that all things that happen in life are “father filtered.”
“Nothing could come into my life without the heavenly father’s permission,” he said.
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice
