One of the greatest blessings during difficult seasons of life is finding people who have walked through suffering before you. People who don’t offer shallow answers or easy fixes, but who point you back to Christ in the middle of the pain. For me, Vaneetha Risner has been one of those voices.
Vaneetha Risner is a Christian author, speaker, and regular contributor to ministries such as Desiring God. Throughout her life she has endured extraordinary hardship, including childhood illness, the loss of a child, divorce, chronic pain, and ongoing health challenges. Yet through it all she consistently points readers toward God’s faithfulness and sovereignty.
What I appreciate most about Vaneetha is her honesty. She doesn’t minimize suffering or pretend faith makes everything easy. Instead, she acknowledges the reality of pain while showing how God can meet us in the middle of it.
During some of my own darkest days, her words helped me understand that trusting God doesn’t mean having all the answers. Sometimes it simply means continuing to take the next step when nothing makes sense. One of my favorite podcast of hers was when she interviewed her sister Shalini. They discussed both of their lives, how they grew up and what they went through. The genuineness and the tragedy Vaneetha has gone through cannot be overstated in my opinion. But her grace and simplicity and her confidence in God permeates it all. I also loved her sister’s perspective and could relate to both so many ways.
One of my favorite moments from Vaneetha’s podcast comes around the 24-minute mark when she says, “After Paul died, I didn’t have a lot of thankful words.”
That simple statement resonated deeply with me because it captures something many of us experience in grief but are often afraid to admit. Sometimes gratitude doesn’t come easily. Sometimes faith feels raw and wounded. Sometimes all we can bring to God is our pain.
As she shared about losing her son and learning how to lament, she spoke about starting where she was rather than where she thought she should be. That perspective was incredibly freeing for me. Vaneetha was instrumental in helping me understand both the importance of lament and the necessity of honesty before God.
For so much of my life, I thought faith meant having the right answers or saying the right things. Through Vaneetha’s testimony, I began to see that God invites us to bring Him our real thoughts, real questions, and real grief. Lament isn’t a lack of faith—it’s often one of the deepest expressions of it.
If you’re walking through betrayal, grief, loss, chronic illness, or any season that feels overwhelming, I encourage you to spend some time with Vaneetha’s work. She won’t give you easy answers, but she will remind you that God remains faithful even when life doesn’t unfold the way we hoped.
