What I learned when my daughter’s faith broke and mine didn’t
“I’m just so angry at God.”
That came across my phone at 5:23 in the morning, one day after I was told I had cancer. I was somewhere on I-40 in the dark with a trailer behind me and my headset on, and my daughter Brandy — my Boop — had just told me her faith was coming apart over something that was happening to me.
You get about three seconds with a thing like that. You can’t sit with it. You can’t go look something up. She is hurting right now, at 5:23 in the morning, and she is waiting on her daddy to say something.
I’ve thought about that text a thousand times since. Not because I got it perfect. Because I didn’t, and I’ve had to learn what I’d say now.
Cancer doesn’t leave you anybody to be mad at
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a diagnosis. It comes with all the rage of a crime and none of the criminal.
If a drunk driver had put me in a ditch, Brandy would have had somebody to hate. A name. A face. Somewhere to aim all that. But cancer doesn’t show up with a face. Cells did something they weren’t supposed to do, and there’s no one standing at the end of that sentence.
Anger doesn’t just evaporate because it can’t find a target, though. It goes looking. And when a person’s been raised to believe God is over all of it, God is the only one big enough left standing to take the weight.
So when my girl said she was angry at God, she wasn’t walking away from Him. She was throwing everything she had at the only one she believed could have stopped it. That is not a faith problem. That is love with nowhere to go.
What I believe didn’t transfer over a text message
I told her what I believe, and I still believe every word of it. God didn’t give me cancer. He gave us free will and a world that runs the way it runs, and He does not sit up there handing out tumors. Cancer isn’t punishment. It isn’t abandonment. It’s life, and life happened to me the same way it’s happened to people I love.
All true. All mine. And I sent it down the wire to a 30-something woman crying in her kitchen who had not asked me a theology question.
That’s the part I got wrong, and I want to be honest about it. Peace doesn’t transfer. I’d had 24 hours with this thing. I’d already done my wrestling on a dark highway with the tears running down my face where nobody could see it. She was starting hers. I handed her the finish line and she was still at the start.
You cannot give somebody your peace. You can only stay with them while they find their own.
What actually helped
Looking back, the part of that conversation that did her any good wasn’t the explaining. It was three things.
I didn’t correct her. I never once told her she shouldn’t be angry at God. I want to say that plain, because I think a lot of us reach for that first, and it’s the wrong reach. Telling somebody their anger is a sin just teaches them to stop telling you about it.
I gave her something to hold instead of something to argue with. Psalm 46:1. God is my strength and refuge. Not a lecture. A handhold. Something short enough to remember at 3 in the morning when it comes back around.
And I stayed in it. I kept texting. I didn’t go quiet and let her sit there.
Because here’s what I’ve come to believe about anger at God. It is still a conversation with God. Job hollered. David hollered, half the Psalms are somebody furious and saying so out loud. A person yelling at Heaven still believes somebody’s up there listening. The one I’d worry about is the one who’s stopped talking altogether.
The ones who love us are carrying two things
This is the part that took me longest to see, and I think it’s the part most people miss.
I had one thing to deal with. Cancer. My family had two. They had my cancer, and they had the question of what kind of God lets that happen to their dad. I never had to carry that second one, because I settled it a long time ago.
So here’s this strange gap that opens up. I’m the sick one and I’m at peace. They’re the healthy ones and they’re falling apart. And that gap is lonely on both sides. They feel guilty for not being as strong as the patient. The patient feels guilty for the peace, like maybe it’s coming across as not fighting.
Let me say that clear, for anybody in it. Peace isn’t quitting. I’m going down kicking, screaming, and fighting like hell. And your family being angry isn’t weakness. It’s just what love does when it’s scared.
If you’re the one who’s angry
Maybe you’re not the patient. Maybe you’re the daughter, the son, the wife, the friend. Maybe you’re the one reading this with your jaw set because somebody you love got news last week and you cannot say out loud what you’re feeling toward God right now.
Say it out loud.
Say it to Him, if nowhere else. He’s not fragile and He’s not surprised. You’re not going to damage anything that’s real by being honest with it. The anger isn’t the opposite of faith. Silence is.
And quit trying to be okay on a schedule. Nobody handed you a deadline. My Boop said she wanted to be strong and didn’t know how, and I’ve thought since that she already was — she just thought strong meant not feeling it. It doesn’t. Strong is telling the truth about where you are and showing up anyway.
If you’re the one they’re coming to
And if you’re on my end of it — if you’re the one people call at 5 in the morning — you don’t need answers. I promise you they’re not actually asking for answers.
Don’t fix the anger. Don’t defend God, He can manage. Don’t hand them a reason for any of it, because the reasons land like insults when the wound is that fresh.
Just be there and keep being there. Let them say the ugly part. Give them one small true thing to hold. Then ask them something ordinary the next day, because grief gets tired of being grief and sometimes a person needs to talk about the weather.
I put together a short printable guide with what to say and what to skip in those conversations. It’s free and it’s short enough to keep in a glove box. Because I wrote it for people who are going to need it in a parking lot.
Where we landed
Brandy and I are good. She’s still got hard days and so do I. I don’t know that she ever got a satisfying answer out of me, and I’ve made my peace with that too — I don’t think there is one, not the kind that fits in a text.
What she got was her dad, still on the line at 5:23 in the morning, not flinching at the worst thing she could say.
Maybe that’s all any of us can do for each other. Not the answer. Just the staying.
If somebody you love is angry at God tonight, don’t argue them out of it. Sit down in it with them. The peace comes later, and it comes on its own, and it never once came from somebody telling me I shouldn’t feel what I was feeling.
Until Next Time – Stay Strong
— Scott
Nobody Fights Alone
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” — Philippians 4:13
