WHEN Jason was 13 years old, he set his heart on one day serving as a full-time minister at Bethel, the world headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York. He made a wooden box for himself and called it his Bethel box. He began to accumulate things in it that he thought would be useful when he began his Bethel career.

However, just three months after his 18th birthday, Jason was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a relentless, painful bowel disorder. “It just crushed me,” he recalls. “All I could do was call my Dad at work and cry. I knew that, if nothing else, it meant my dream of going to Bethel had met a roadblock.”

“When you are young, you feel invincible,” observes Jason, mentioned before. “Then, suddenly, being seriously ill shakes you out of that. You feel that you have become old overnight, since you have to sit back and slow down.” Yes, facing new limitations is challenging.

Jason found that another big challenge comes when others fail to understand your condition. Jason has what may be termed an “invisible illness.” His outward appearance belies the problems inside. “My body doesn’t digest food as it should,” Jason explains, “so I have to eat often and I eat greater quantities than many do. Yet, I still stay thin. Also, at times I get so tired that I cannot keep my eyes open in the middle of the day. But people make comments that show they think I’m overindulgent or lazy. They say things like: ‘You know you can do better. You’re not even trying!’”

Jason has younger brothers and sisters who don’t always understand why he can’t do the things he did before, such as taking them out to play ball. “But I know that if I get injured,” Jason observes, “it could take weeks for me to heal. They tend to compare my pain to theirs and say, ‘He’s just groaning to get attention.’ Their worst pain is probably something like a sprained foot, so they simply can’t imagine what my pain is like.”

If your illness seems to be putting a burden on your family, you may struggle with guilt. Your parents may also feel guilty. “Both my parents believe they may have given me the problem,” says Jason. “Kids usually adjust to an illness after they come to grips with it. But parents have a harder time. They apologize to me over and over. I constantly have to do my best to try to relieve their feelings of guilt.”