Faith and Resilience in the Face of Chronic Illness
What happens to faith when suffering doesn’t resolve quickly — or at all?
In this episode of Honest Christian Conversations, I sit down with David Libby, author of A Different World: God’s Sovereignty in the Face of Suffering, to discuss life amid long-term hardship and the questions that inevitably arise when illness reshapes everything.
David shares his family’s journey through chronic Lyme disease — not as a polished testimony, but as an honest wrestling with pain, theology, and trust. Along the way, we confront ideas many believers quietly carry: that strong faith guarantees healing, that suffering signals failure, or that God’s goodness must always look like comfort.
Instead, this conversation asks a more complicated — and more hopeful — question:
What if faith isn’t about controlling outcomes, but about trusting the One who holds them?
We also discuss the role of community in suffering, the danger of reducing faith to a formula, and how God uses hardship not to punish but to refine and sanctify.
⬇️ Listen now to step into this conversation.
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Wife. Mother of five. Podcaster. Fiction Novelist
Ana is the host of the Honest Christian Conversations podcast and a prodigal saved by God’s unending grace.
She grew up in a legalistic Christian home where asking questions often felt wrong. In her early twenties, overwhelmed by confusion and hurt, she walked away from her faith. Yet even then, God’s love never stopped pursuing her. At thirty years old—and after a painful second divorce—He brought her back to himself, and she has never looked back.
As Ana returned to Christ, she began rebuilding her faith from the ground up and asked the questions she once feared to ask. Along that journey, she discovered inconsistencies, misplaced teachings, and even lies woven into the Christianity she grew up with. Instead of destroying her faith, this only deepened it. Out of that discovery, she founded Honest Christian Conversations. Ana's heart is to help others navigate the same tension she once lived with: wanting to know the real Jesus while sorting through the noise of deceptive teachings, spiritual manipulation, and “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
Everything she creates flows from gratitude for the God who rescued her, restored her, and continues to shape her into who He intended her to be.
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