Fé & Esperança
I Trust in God
# I Trust in God
by Anna Carolina Munhoz
There are things in life we don't choose to face. They just arrive. And when they arrive, they come all at once.
That's how it was for me.
In February 2025, I heard two words no doctor should have to say, and no patient should have to hear: breast cancer. And shortly after, as if one wasn't enough: chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Two diagnoses. One body. And a fear I'd never felt before—the fear of the unknown, the fear of not knowing what comes next, the fear of dying.
I didn't know yet that this would be the beginning of the most intense and sacred journey of my life.
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The Control I Didn't Have
I am a woman who takes a stand. Who makes decisions. Who gets involved.
So when the treatment began, I did what I always do: I took control. I organized everything. I accepted the plan. I followed the protocols. Chemotherapy, the side effects no one truly prepares you for, the days when my body no longer felt like my own—I went through it all standing, in control.
Or so I thought.
Because while I tried to hold onto everything with my hands, life gradually took one thing after another.
Vacations that never happened. My husband's departure. Deeply challenging moments that arrived in the middle of chemotherapy, when I was bald, when I felt invisible, when I most needed to feel loved. The surgery. The open scar. Radiotherapy, because the tumor was large, and there was still a battle ahead. The loss of my visa. The loss of everything I knew as my normal life.
Everything I tried to hold onto slipped away.
And I found myself in a place I never thought I'd reach: the place where control ends.
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What Remains When Everything Else is Gone
There's a verse that stayed with me throughout this entire time. Isaiah 45:2:
> "I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron."
I didn't understand this verse with my head. I understood it with my body. With the days when I had no strength but somehow made it to the next day. With the moments when everything should have collapsed, but didn't. With the doors that kept opening even when I no longer had the energy to knock on them.
God was going ahead. I just wasn't seeing it because I was too busy trying to go along too.
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The Tension of Trusting
I need to be honest here—because this article isn't about a neat and tidy faith.
Trusting in God was, and still is, tense.
It's not easy to let go of control when you're the type of person who always held onto everything. It's not easy to believe when you're bald in front of the mirror and feeling strange in your own body. It's not easy to trust when you go through heartbreaking moments. It's not easy to say "I trust in God" when you're afraid of dying and that fear is real, physical, present.
No one tells you that true faith hurts.
That sometimes you trust with tears streaming down your face. That sometimes you worship God with anger in your heart. That sometimes the only prayer that comes out is: "I don't know anything anymore. But I'm here."
That's exactly what I experienced.
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What I Understood
Today, looking back, I can see what I couldn't see in the midst of the storm.
I didn't succumb. And it wasn't because I was strong enough. It was because someone was going ahead of me the entire time—breaking the bars that I would never have the strength to break, leveling the paths that I would never have the wisdom to find.
It was God. All along, it was God.
Not the distant God who observes from afar. The God who descends. The God who is in the hospital room. The God who is there on the day of surgery, on the day you look in the mirror and don't recognize yourself, on the day you are alone and the silence is heavy. The God who calls you by name—by your name—even when you no longer have a voice to respond.
This God I found. Not in perfect circumstances. In imperfect ones. In broken ones. In ones I would never have chosen.
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For You Who Are in the Middle
If you are reading this and are in the middle of your storm—not at the end, not with the answer, but in the middle, where everything hurts, and nothing makes sense yet—
I want to tell you what I needed to hear:
You don't need to understand to trust.
You don't need to be well to worship. You don't need courage to survive. You just need to make it to the next day. And then the next. And let Him go ahead.
The iron bars? They're not your problem.
He has already gone ahead.
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— Anna Carolina Munhoz, June 2026
Written during hormone therapy, with a tense faith and a grateful heart.
- #faith
- #cancer
- #trust
- #God
- #testimony
- #Isaiah
- #hope
- #healing