Chapter 9 — When my Faith was Tested

In December 2020, four years into serving in a calling that had finally come full circle, just as life and work had found a steady rhythm, I was diagnosed with cancer.

There was no long season of anticipation. No family history. No lingering medical concern. Just a couple of weeks, an unexpected lump under my arm, a few tests — and then a word that instantly summoned my faith.

Cancer.

My prior reliance on the truth of Psalm 3:5 — “I lay down and slept; I wake again, for the Lord sustained me” — had strengthened my faith for just such a time as this. And that truth sustained me through the next eight months, as treatment became part of the landscape of my life: chemotherapy, radiation, appointments, fatigue, uncertainty.

The body that had faithfully carried me through decades of work and adventure suddenly felt fragile. Strength could no longer be assumed. Energy could not be scheduled. Control — which I had never truly possessed — was now visibly absent.

It is one thing to counsel others through their fear.

It is another to walk by faith in your own.

In those months, the language of serving expanded to include being served.

I was both counselor and patient.

The one waiting for lab results.

The one navigating side effects.

The one learning the slow discipline of receiving help.

And something quiet but important happened. The theology I had been teaching was tested through my own weakness.

For years I had encouraged others that God’s Will was not fragile, that grace was not reserved for seasons of clarity, that no chapter was wasted. Living those words required more than articulation. It required surrender.

Cancer strips away productivity. It interrupts plans. It narrows the world to the present moment.

But it did not remove God’s presence. If anything, His nearness felt less abstract and more essential. There were days when strength returned briefly, and days when it did not. There were moments of confidence and moments of quiet concern. Yet through it all, one steady truth remained:

God was not rushing this chapter of my life.

And He was fully present in it.

In the first year after treatment ended, I found myself walking with several individuals facing their own diagnoses — different types, different prognoses, different fears. I did not approach them with polished answers. I approached them with shared terrain.

I knew the waiting.

I knew the fatigue.

I knew the strange mixture of hope and vulnerability that accompanies every test result and appointment.

What I once would have offered from empathy alone, I now offered from experience. My calling expanded again — not through achievement or performance, but through weakness.

I began to see that even this interruption had not fallen outside the careful shaping of God. It deepened my compassion. It slowed my pace. It clarified what mattered. It refined my trust in ways that my own effort never could.

Cancer did not define me. But it did refine me.

And now, years later, with health restored, I look back on that season not as an accidental detour, but as a severe mercy — one that exposed what was fragile in me and strengthened what was eternal.

I once believed my calling returned when I was ready to steward it well. Now I understand something deeper: It was never sustained by my strength to begin with.

I was always held by grace.

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Where has weakness interrupted your plans — and quietly revealed a deeper foundation beneath them?

What has suffering refined in you that your own efforts never could?