If God Is Real, Why Does My Kid Have Cancer?

Monday, February 17, 2025.

It’s 2 a.m., the hospital chair is making a permanent dent in your spine, and the beeping machines have become the soundtrack of your life.

And somewhere in the haze of grief, exhaustion, and medically-induced small talk, the thought creeps in: If God is real, why does my kid have cancer?

Not exactly the kind of question that gets answered neatly in a Sunday sermon.

No tidy clichés, no Hallmark-card reassurances. Just a blunt, stomach-churning silence where certainty used to be.

The Cosmic Shrug

Harold Kushner, a rabbi who lost his own child to a rare disease, wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People in an attempt to wrestle this question to the ground. He came to a radical conclusion: maybe we’ve been expecting too much from God.

Maybe God isn’t a divine marionette master pulling every string. Maybe suffering isn’t given to us for a reason—it just is. And maybe God’s role isn’t to prevent tragedy, but to comfort us in the wreckage.

That’s not exactly a satisfying answer. It’s more of a cosmic shrug. But it’s a shrug filled with deep, guttural understanding.

Because the alternative—the idea of a God who chooses to let children suffer, who weighs out the pain like some sadistic celestial pharmacist—feels like a cruelty that even a decent human wouldn’t inflict. And if God is less merciful than your neighborhood barista, what’s the point?

The Denial of Death and the Problem of Meaning

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, argued that much of human life is spent trying to ignore one fundamental truth: we are fragile, mortal creatures.

And we hate that.

We construct elaborate belief systems, distraction economies, and self-importance rituals to convince ourselves we have control. But when your child is in a hospital bed, that illusion shatters.

So maybe the question isn’t why this happened. Maybe the question is: now what?

What do we do with suffering? Do we turn inward, let it erode our capacity to love? Do we curse the sky and detach from meaning? Or do we, somehow, against all odds, keep showing up for each other?

Kushner and Becker both suggest that meaning isn’t something given to us—it’s something we create. Meaning is a verb. It’s the meals people bring, the nurses who show up shift after shift, the exhausted dad holding his kid’s hand.

The Auschwitz Question

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, had every reason to reject the notion of meaning.

He watched people die senselessly, violently, with no grand moral arc to justify it. And yet, he insisted that even in suffering, there is the possibility of choice.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” he wrote.

That doesn’t mean suffering should happen. It doesn’t mean there’s a reason behind it. It just means that, in its wake, we are left with a terrible freedom: to decide what to do with what remains.

C.S. Lewis and the Grief That Breaks Faith

Then there’s C.S. Lewis, the Oxford professor best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, who spent years as a Christian apologist defending God’s goodness—until his wife died of cancer. Then his faith crumbled like wet paper.

He wrote A Grief Observed in the aftermath, an unfiltered, rage-filled account of what loss does to belief. I first read it when I was 15. He described his wife as a “cloud of atoms he fell in love with.”

“If H. 'is not,' then she never was.

I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren't, and never were, any people.

Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared.” C. S. Lewis

His conclusion? When pain is deep enough, it doesn’t just hurt—it rearranges you.

"The tortures occur," he wrote. "If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a God, he seems to have no regard for us."

Lewis was haunted by the idea that maybe all his beliefs had been a house of cards, that God’s supposed love was nothing but a shadow we cast on the universe to keep from going mad.

But as the book unfolds, he also starts to realize that grief itself—the capacity to love so much that it devastates you—might be the realest thing in the world.

"Perhaps," he wrote later, "our joys are glimpses of reality."

Maybe God isn’t in the explanations. Maybe God isn’t in the doctrines. Maybe God is in the fact that love is the one thing we refuse to let death take from us.

The Impolite Truth

No one wants to hear this. People want certainty. They ache for it through tears in their therapy sessions with me.

They want me to tell them their child’s suffering is part of a plan.

They want to believe that someday, they’ll get an explanation that makes it all make sense.

And maybe they will. Maybe there is some vast cosmic structure that we can’t yet comprehend. Maybe.

But in the here and now, talking to me, your family therapist, when your kid is sick, and nothing about the world seems remotely okay, what remains for us to hold on to?

Compassion. Shared grief. The audacity to love despite knowing the risks.

Maybe that’s God. Not a puppeteer. Not a chess master. Just presence. Just the love that refuses to disappear, even in the face of unbearable loss.

That’s not a particularly satisfying answer. But it’s the only one I’ve got right now.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.