Standing in the Storm

There have been a number of times in the course of my pastoral ministry when I have had to journey with people through cancer. Although everyone would have loved to tell a story of miraculous healing, I know that stories of discovering God’s grace while pressing on through can be just as inspiring. This is a great story that fits right into this category. Thank you, Matt, for sharing it, and I pray that it will be an encouragement to many.

Matt, thank you for writing your breath-taking journey in this way. A wonderful reminder of God’s peace and presence during the challenging times. So helpfully written, filled with heartache and buckets of hope.

Matt tells the moving story of his life in Africa, his move to the UK and then how his young family went through the turmoil of the onset of cancer, and their subsequent deliverances. It is a great account of faith triumphing over adversity – one with which I can so identify because of my life in Africa, and losing my first wife through cancer. May all who read it be edified and blessed!

Here is a memoir that will touch your heart when following Matt through his unusual childhood in Zimbabwe, his journey into faith and his desperate move to the UK. God has been with him, putting him in the right place, the right job and with the right people around him to help him cope with a devastating diagnosis of Stage Four cancer. This is not a classic ‘feel-good’ book – it is real and gritty, yet reveals God’s great love and faithfulness throughout Matt’s joyous times as well as through great grief, including unpleasant and traumatic treatment.

Authentic and inspiring! Matt McChlery’s book Standing in the Storm captivates the reader in its gripping realness. He is able to take you on the journey through diagnosis, fear, pain, brokenness, hope and faith. And through his own brave documenting of his experiences of cancer you feel inspired to live, to laugh, to love and to be thankful for the privileges of life and even of growing old. Through his story you feel the pull to hope and to believe, whatever your own battles are. Having met Matt years ago at university, and having seen some of his journey with God over the years, I applaud this book as one that tells a story of a David against a Goliath, and we know who wins.

Books like these cost so much to write in ways those who have never dealt with a dread disease cannot know, but I am grateful that he has written it and it will forever stand as pillar of hope and truth for many, a memorial stone to the kindness of God and a beacon of light in the darkness for those who know the pain of suffering.

I believe it will pour courage into many!

What do you do when the bad news seems to crush all the good news, and a combination of life and death experiences throws you into a tailspin? Matt’s book, Standing in the Storm, is vulnerable yet hopeful and will give you a renewed robust confidence in Jesus, no matter what struggle is staring you down.

Cancer isn’t convenient. It disrupts lives and challenges our view of ourselves and our world. For the Christian, its shocking diagnosis also brings into question what we think we know of God. All this was Matt’s experience, which he relates with disarming honesty in this book. He already knew of God as Saviour and rescuer through his conversion in his native Zimbabwe, but now had to ask: could God be his healer, too?

I read Standing in the Storm in two sittings, unable to put it down. The fascinating descriptions of his early life in African culture provide a great backdrop to what was waiting for him in Britain: a new teaching career, a wife and… non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Extracts from his blog/journal, written at the time, ensure that this is no sanitised, after-the-event story but a pulling-no-punches account of a journey he didn’t want to make. Through it all, hope shines through the despair and pain – a hope based on God, the only One who can keep us standing in the storm.