When God Showed Up Anyway

—a reflection on faith, fragility, and unexpected grace—

There’s a kind of guilt I never knew had a name.


Not the kind that comes when something goes wrong.


The kind that visits when things don’t go as wrong as they could have.

My daughter is four.


She has cancer.


And autism.


And she doesn’t speak—not with words, anyway.


So when the pain comes, I have to guess.


Is it her stomach? Her bones? The sharp, chemical ache of chemo?


I read her the way you read weather—watching the shift in her clouds,


feeling for the pressure in the room.

I’ve met parents in these hospital halls who’ve told me,


with voices like cracked porcelain,

“I could never believe in a God who would let this happen to children.”

And I understand. I do.

But here’s the truth I hesitate to say out loud:


I have seen God more clearly through this diagnosis


than I ever did in the quiet seasons.


Not in thunder or burning bushes—


but in the way a nurse kneels to meet my daughter’s eyes,


in the hands that hold her with instinct and tenderness,


in the stranger who sees my exhaustion and calls it beautiful.

God didn’t show up as rescue.


He showed up as presence.


Over and over again.

But here’s where the guilt coils tight in my chest:


Her diagnosis isn’t terminal.


And I say that with trembling gratitude,


but also with a grief I don’t know where to place.


Because some children don’t get to grow up.


Some parents don’t get to carry home a child who survived.

So who am I to speak of revelation?


Of grace?


Of faith that held when their worlds fell apart?

I want to believe I’d still say God is good

if the scan had said something else.


If the treatments had failed.


If I were standing at a graveside, not a bedside.


But how could I know?

And yet…


faith isn’t a contest.


Suffering isn’t a ladder.


Grief doesn’t ask for comparisons, only witness.


And light isn’t less holy just because someone else is in deeper shadow.

I have seen God in this storm.


Not because we were spared,


but because we weren’t alone.

If you’re in the thick of it—whatever it is—


if your belief is barely breathing, or if it died long ago,


please know this:


There is no shame in your story.


No wrong way to feel what you feel.

But if you, like me, have seen a flicker of divine love


in the breaking open—


you can speak of it, too.


Not to prove anything.


Just to say:

He was here. Even here. Even now.