It started as a cough.
By the time the scan came back, Lynn - forty-one, two sons, sixteen years cancer-free - had a tumour the size of a fist in her lung. Stage 4. The prognosis was weeks.
This is the story of what followed.
Where Are You God? My Wife Has Cancer is Michael Janse van Rensburg's memoir of love and lament - a husband, father, and theologian's account of the months between the first cough and the questions he could no longer outrun. Written in present tense, while his wife was still alive.
How do you sit across the breakfast table from a wife who is dying, and pray? How do you tell a twelve-year-old? How do you keep believing when the prayers come back as silence?
The book moves slowly through small rooms. A hospital bedside. A passage with an oxygen concentrator running. The bedroom where two boys lie in the dark playing a tickle game called Are you happy? It refuses the easy verses. It does not promise miracles. It sits, instead, with Psalm 88 - the only psalm in scripture that ends in darkness - and with the two-word verse before Lazarus is raised: Jesus wept.
A memoir for readers walking through cancer or grief, for those wrestling with the old question of faith and suffering, for anyone who has cried out into a silent sky and wondered whether anyone was listening.
A Christian memoir in the tradition of literary lament. The long Holy Saturday between crucifixion and resurrection, where Sunday has not yet come.
Janse Van Rensburg, Michael: - "Michael Janse van Rensburg lives in Strand, on the eastern shore of False Bay in the Western Cape, with his wife Lynn and their two sons, TJ and Daniel. He was born on 4 December 1984 and married Lynn in 2008.He holds a Doctor of Theology from the University of the Western Cape, awarded in 2024 for his dissertation From Omega to Alpha: A Critical Analysis of Theistic Evolution in the Theology of Ted Peters, written under Prof Ernst Conradie. His scholarly work engages Ted Peters' theology - including a theology of the cross, the problem of natural suffering, and the question of how a good God may be understood to be present in a world that hurts. The dissertation was completed just more than a year before his wife's cancer recurred, a fact he has since had cause to reflect on at length.By profession he is the Chief Executive Officer of Heritage Western Cape and the Director: Museums, Heritage and Geographical Names with the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport - work that has taken him from communities along the Cape to UNESCO World Heritage Committee sessions abroad.He was raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition, in a family of Christian faith - a line that runs back through his grandfather, Ds Helgard "Bombaai" Janse van Rensburg, a missionary to India. As an adult he became a member of his local Pentecostal church, and has spent much of the last few years thinking about how a good God can be present in a world that hurts. This book is what happened when that thinking was no longer abstract.The book is, at its centre, about his wife Lynn. Lynn was first treated for sarcoma in 2009, recovered, and lived clear of cancer for sixteen years. The disease returned in October 2025 in a different organ, and Lynn has spent the months since at the centre of the household with the same quiet bravery that has marked her life. She read every page of this book before it went to press. The book is hers as much as it is his.His sons TJ (born 2013) and Daniel (born 2016) are the heart of several of the chapters. Their father has tried to set down enough of them, on these pages, that they will be able to find their parents in the book one day, and not only their sorrow.When he is not with his family or at work, he is out running, or reading and learning - late, and as a husband - how to sit on the edge of a bed without trying to fix anything.This is his first book, and the one he never intended to write."
