Tim Keller Spent Decades Teaching About Suffering. Then He Was Diagnosed.

What happens to a belief when you finally need it?

Tim Keller was one of the best-known pastors in America. He founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, wrote bestselling books, and had written and preached at length on suffering and death. In May 2020 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The following year he wrote an essay for The Atlantic called “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death.” It’s an unusually honest piece of writing, because he doesn’t say his beliefs carried him smoothly through.

He describes finding that things he had taught for decades had to be learned again, at a different depth, now that they applied to him. He knew them and had explained them to thousands of people, and they still had to make the journey from his head to somewhere lower down.

Most of us assume that a mature faith is one where that gap has closed. You believe it, so you feel it, so you’re at peace. Doubt and fear belong to beginners.

And here was a man with every qualification for maturity saying that when the news came, the work started again.

Then comes the surprising part. He wrote that he and his wife had never been happier, and had never enjoyed their days more. He was precise about why. The illness hadn’t been taken away. He died in May 2023, aged 72. What had changed was what they were asking ordinary life to give them. Once they stopped expecting the good things in their days to bear the full weight of their happiness, they found they enjoyed those things more.

I’m wary of turning this into a tidy lesson. Not everyone who is ill finds joy, and nobody should be made to feel they’ve failed if they don’t.

But I think there’s something here for the much larger number of people who aren’t dying, just disappointed. By the middle of life nearly everyone is carrying a prayer that wasn’t answered the way they asked. A marriage that didn’t heal, or a child who walked away, or a diagnosis that stood.

The usual assumption is that such things either break faith or prove it. Keller’s account suggests a third thing. A hard season can show you that some of what you called faith was really confidence that life would go well. Losing that is painful, but it’s a different loss from losing God, and what remains can be sturdier.

That’s very close to how Diane Cooper writes about disappointment in Faith for the Middle of Life, in a chapter called “When God Is Silent.” She describes a faith that can sit with unanswered questions, and a trust that doesn’t demand explanation.

Is that a deeper faith, in your experience? Or is it what people say when they’ve lowered their expectations of God?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN2954Y6

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