I still remember sitting alone in the hospital chapel, waiting for the phone call.
Earlier that morning, a neuroradiologist friend had arranged an urgent MRI before the day’s imaging began. My vision had been deteriorating rapidly. Now I sat in the same chapel where I had so often sat with grieving families, waiting this time for news about myself.
As a physician, I already suspected what the scan would show. My peripheral vision was fading, and my hormone regulation was off. Something was compressing structures deep in my brain. When the phone rang, the news confirmed it. My brain tumor had returned.
Four years earlier, I had been diagnosed with a craniopharyngioma, a rare tumor in one of the most delicate regions of the brain, surrounded by structures responsible for vision, hormone regulation, memory, sleep, and consciousness. Surgery had gone remarkably well; the tumor appeared completely removed and my scans were clear. I assumed the worst was behind me.
Now it was back, larger, compressing my optic nerves and disrupting critical hormonal systems. My vision was worsening; delay carried a real risk of permanent blindness. I needed to decide, and I did not have long.
The Decision I Could Not Outsource
People assume physicians know exactly what to do when they themselves become patients. But medicine can identify options and estimate probabilities; it cannot deliver certainty.
My neurosurgeon was confident he could operate again. He was the same surgeon who had removed the tumor the first time, and part of me wanted to trust that path. But as I reviewed the literature, a harder truth emerged: repeat surgery in this region carries substantially higher rates of permanent vision loss, cognitive injury, and worsening hormonal failure. I wanted to believe I would be the outlier, but wisdom required taking the data seriously.
Radiation therapy offered another route, but with potential long-term consequences for vision and cognition. A third option emerged from newer research: a targeted oral chemotherapy attacking a specific molecular mutation in this tumor. The early data were promising but limited, and no physician in my state had experience using it.
None of the options came with guarantees, and no one could tell me what the “right” answer was.
What met me in that silence was not clarity about what to do next, but the steady presence of a God who has never asked me to be certain about the future, only faithful in the present.
What I Wanted Most Was Certainty
During that season, I prayed constantly, sought counsel from wise believers and other physicians, and searched Scripture. I begged God for clarity.
What I wanted, more than anything, was for God to tell me what to do, and to tell me it would be okay. That the treatment would work. That my vision would return. But that did not come. He did not whisper, “Choose this option.” He did not remove the ambiguity or the fear.
Then I understood something I had long suspected but never grasped so personally: many of us have come to confuse God’s guidance with emotional certainty. We assume that if God is leading, we will feel peace, and if fear or uncertainty remain, we must not yet have heard from Him clearly. But fear is not evidence that we are outside God’s will. Sometimes fear is simply what faithfulness feels like when the future is unclear.
Faithfulness Without Guarantees
After research, expert consultation, and prayer, I chose the targeted chemotherapy.
Getting there required more than spiritual discernment. I identified the physician who had first described the molecular mutation that made this treatment possible; she stepped out of a conference in Tokyo to take my call. I found a local oncologist willing to prescribe and manage the regimen with no neuro-oncology infrastructure in my state. When my insurance later denied coverage, I gathered evidence and appealed until the decision was reversed. Guidance did not arrive preassembled. It had to be pursued.
I chose this path not because fear disappeared or God gave me supernatural assurance the treatment would work. I chose it because, after careful deliberation, it seemed the wisest path with the information I had. Then I had to act without knowing how the story would unfold.
That, I think, is where many Christians struggle. We want obedience to come with guarantees, as if God’s guidance should protect us from painful outcomes. But Scripture never promises that. Abraham obeyed without certainty (Hebrews 11:8). Jesus obeyed through the anguish of Gethsemane. Again and again, God calls His people not to certainty or emotional ease, but to trust. The Christian life is not lived by waiting for uncertainty to disappear; it is lived by acting faithfully while uncertainty remains.
God’s Guidance Came as Companionship, Not Answers
What I experienced most deeply that season was not divine explanation, but divine presence.
God did not give me answers. He gave me himself. His guidance did not come as certainty about outcomes. It came as the quiet assurance that whatever happened next, I would not face it alone. If the treatment failed, if my vision worsened, if suffering increased, he would remain with me.
Even that sense of presence was not constant. There were moments when God’s nearness felt unmistakable, and others when I had to trust his presence without sensing it.
This is the deeper promise of the Christian faith: not that God will show us every step in advance, but that He will walk with us through whatever comes.
Living in the Middle
As I write this, my tumor has shrunk significantly, but it has not disappeared. I do not know whether the treatment will keep working, or whether surgery or radiation still lie ahead. Even if the tumor vanished, some consequences will likely remain for life. Structures in my brain involved in hormone regulation, fluid balance, and stress response were damaged and are unlikely to recover. Functions my body once handled silently now require conscious management.
I am living in the middle of an unfinished story.
And perhaps that is where many of us live more often than we realize. We wait for resolution before we can trust God fully. But much of life is lived in the middle.
This season has taught me that faithful decision-making is not about uncovering hidden answers from God. It is about stewarding the wisdom and opportunities He has given us as responsibly as we can, then entrusting the outcome to Him. Trust is not confidence that things will go well, but confidence that God will remain faithful even if they do not.
I think sometimes of that hospital chapel—the same room where I have held the hands of parents receiving the worst news of their lives. I sat there that morning not as a physician but as a patient, not as someone with answers but as someone without them. What met me in that silence was not clarity about what to do next, but the steady presence of a God who has never asked me to be certain about the future, only faithful in the present.
And that, I am learning, is enough.
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