"Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is the sound faith makes when it refuses to lie."
What do you do when the verses stop fitting?
When the diagnosis does not change. When the prayer goes unanswered. When someone hands you everything happens for a reason and you have to walk away before you say something you cannot take back.
Have you felt ashamed of being angry at God? Have you wondered whether your questions disqualify you from being counted among the faithful?
They do not — and you are in older company than you think.
Dr Michael Janse van Rensburg spent six years writing a doctoral thesis on how a good God can be present in a suffering world. Fifteen months after he finished it, his wife Lynn was diagnosed with stage four cancer and given weeks to live. This book was written from inside that room — not afterwards, not from a safe distance, but from within a story that has not yet resolved.
This is not a book about getting over grief. It is a book for people who are not on the other side yet.
Drawing on Scripture's own language of protest — the psalms of lament, Job's unanswered questions, Gethsemane, and a Saviour who wept at a grave He was about to open — When Faith Learns to Lament gives grieving Christians permission to bring God the truth instead of a performance.
Inside you will find:
- That roughly a third of the Psalms are laments, and what the prayer book God gave His people says about the prayers you are allowed to pray
- Psalm 88, the prayer that never resolves, and why God kept it in the Bible anyway
- Holy Saturday: how to live an ordinary day inside a crisis with no end date
- Disenfranchised grief, and the losses nobody brings a casserole for
- Telling children the truth, in doses they can carry
- How to let people carry you, and a chapter to hand to anyone who wants to show up for you
- Reflection questions, written prayers, a guide to writing your own lament, and a six-session reading group guide
This book is for anyone who is grieving. Whether what you are carrying is cancer, chronic illness, caregiving, bereavement, divorce, infertility or dementia — or whether you love someone who is carrying it and you do not know what to say — the permission in these pages is yours.
You will not find five steps, a tidy ending, or a promise the author cannot keep. You will find company, honest theology, and permission to grieve without losing your faith.
From the author of Where Are You, God? My Wife Has Cancer.
The book carries a foreword by Pastor Jo Swart, Senior Pastor at Life Church Somerset West, who has known Michael and Lynn since they were teenagers. She came to Lynn's hospital bedside in the week the doctors gave them no hope.
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, 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. By profession he is the Chief Executive Officer of Heritage Western Cape - 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. At the centre of his books is 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. His sons TJ (born 2013) and Daniel (born 2016) are the heart of his books. Michael has tried to set down enough of them, on the pages, that they will be able to find their parents in the books 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.
