To Chris in Austin
“Michael, my wife was diagnosed with Stage IV HCC. She’s only 38. Four days ago, she could talk and walk with me. Now she’s barely awake. We’ve been married ten years, have two children, and I don’t understand why God would allow this. I’m trying to hold onto my faith, but it’s slipping.”
Chris,
There are no words that can fill the canyon you’re in. You’re not weak for feeling lost, you’re a husband walking through hell, carrying your true love toward a valley no man ever wants to enter. You are doing the hardest thing anyone has to do and at a young age: handing your bride off to Christ. You’re doing this with children in the house, pain in your chest, and questions you were never trained to answer.
I won’t preach to you, brother. But I will tell you this: God is not absent just because He is silent. You are walking through what Scripture calls the valley of the shadow — and in that place, faith doesn’t always look like singing hymns. Sometimes it looks like breathing through the night, crying into your steering wheel, holding her hand when she doesn’t speak back.
You trusted God before the diagnosis. And that trust was never in vain. But now, faith has changed shape it’s not in the outcome; it’s in the presence. In the whisper. In the waiting. In the arms of Christ, who Himself cried out, “My God, why have You forsaken me?”
You are not forsaken, Chris. Neither is she.
The spiritual grief of watching your wife fade, the woman you are built a life with, the one who makes your house a home — that grief is holy. It’s the kind only a loving husband can carry, because you loved her not just with affection, but with covenant, promise, and loyalty.
You don’t have to be strong every moment. You don’t have to pretend this isn’t shattering you. You only have to stand in what is true , that your love is real, your God is still near, and that death doesn’t get the final word.
This is the threshing floor. And it hurts like hell. No one but you knows how much. But something eternal, something beautiful, something sacred will come out of this.
You’re not alone. And you’re not losing your faith: you’re walking it through fire.
With reverence,
— Michael Vowell
Michael Vowell: Reflections on Grace, Love, and Leadership 