Have you ever lived through a season when adversity arrives like a wave, then another, and then another still?

Not the kind of wave that merely unsettles the surface, but the kind that rises suddenly and breaks over the whole of your life, sweeping away all sense of normality. The kind that leaves you disoriented, breathless, clinging to whatever will hold. A season when the waters feel dark and wild, and your little ship is thrown about so violently you begin to wonder if you will ever feel steady again.

That is how I would describe the past year and a half of my life.

The first wave — or perhaps I should call it a tsunami — was a spinal tumour. Then came a brain tumour. And then another. As though that were not enough, the already troubled waters have been muddied further by heart problems and breathing difficulties. There have been many moments when I have felt as though I were sinking, as though the sea had risen too high and I no longer knew which way was shore.

And still, the shore is not in sight.

If I were to write a book about this season of my life, I think I would call it When the Shore is Out of Sight. There is something about that image that feels painfully true. Because this kind of suffering is not only about the force of the storm, but about the length of it. It is the not knowing. The not seeing land. The having to keep going when you are weary to the bone and cannot yet imagine the ending.

And yet, even here, there has been comfort.

It comforts me to remember that others have sailed these same dark waters before me. Others have known what it is to be battered by waves they did not choose, to be carried far from the life they once knew, to strain their eyes for some glimpse of safety and find only more sea. And still, they were not lost forever. In time, they reached the shore. The storm did not go on endlessly. The night did not hold them forever. There was life after the storm.

I hold onto that thought more than I can say.

One of those fellow travellers was Lawrence Chewning. The song The Anchor Holds was born in him during a season of sorrow, pain, and heartache. It did not come from a life untouched by trouble, but from the middle of rough seas. During that difficult time, he began playing the piano again. It became a kind of therapy for him, a place where pain could breathe and grief could find sound. I understand that deeply. For me, writing has become something much the same. When life has felt too heavy to carry silently, words have given me somewhere to lay it down.

That is why this song speaks to me so deeply.

It was not written from the shore, but from the storm. It was born in the place where faith is no longer neat or polished, but stripped bare and tested by wind and wave. It speaks of battered ships and torn sails, of falling to one’s knees before raging seas. And perhaps that is why it reaches so deeply into me — because it tells the truth. Not the softened truth, not the kind wrapped up with easy endings, but the hard-won truth that even here, even now, the anchor holds.

I have returned to those words again and again.

Not because they make the storm disappear, but because they remind me that the storm is not the whole story.

I know what it is to feel the sea rising. I know what it is to be tired in body and spirit, to live with pain, uncertainty, fear, and the long strain of not knowing what comes next. I know what it is to search the horizon and see no sign of land. But I also know this: I have not been abandoned in these waters.

The God who sees in the daylight is no less present in the dark.

And sometimes, it is only in the long night, only when the waves are high and the shore has vanished from view, that we begin to understand how sure His hold on us really is. Not always with sudden rescue. Not always with immediate answers. But with a presence that does not let go. With a faithfulness that remains, even when everything else feels as though it is being torn away.

I would never have chosen these waters. I would never have chosen this season. But this much I can say: even here, in the storm, I have learned something I could not have learned on calm seas.

The anchor holds.

Not because the ship is unscarred.
Not because the sails are whole.
Not because I am strong.

But because God is.