When There Is Still Faith

A serious diagnosis can divide life into before and after. Aging can quietly take away abilities once taken for granted. Caregiving can exhaust even the most devoted spouse or family member. Grief can begin before death arrives and continue long after everyone else has returned to ordinary life. In those seasons, faith may no longer look or feel the way it once did.

In When There Is Still Faith: Finding God in Diagnosis, Loss, Grief, and the Final Seasons of Life, Bill Riggs explores what happens when Christian faith meets the realities that cannot simply be prayed away, explained away, or overcome by determination. With compassion, biblical grounding, and an honest understanding of the emotional and psychological realities surrounding illness and loss, he addresses diagnosis, physical decline, caregiving, anticipatory grief, unanswered prayer, death, bereavement, mortality, and the difficult work of letting go.

This is not a book of easy explanations for suffering. It does not suggest that fear means faith has failed, that grief should follow a timetable, or that receiving medical, psychological, palliative, or hospice care represents a lack of trust in God. Instead, Riggs shows how faith can remain present alongside uncertainty, exhaustion, sorrow, difficult decisions, and questions that may never be completely answered.

For those facing serious illness, caring for someone they love, grieving a death, confronting their own mortality, or simply entering the later seasons of adulthood, When There Is Still Faith offers a deeply reassuring message: Christian hope does not depend upon pretending that loss does not hurt. It rests in the presence of God, the grace of Christ, and the promise that death does not have the final word.

Health may change. Independence may diminish. People we love may be taken from our sight. Questions may remain unanswered. Yet even when much of what once seemed permanent has been surrendered, there is still faith.