By Kat Silverglate © 2025-2026

The second of six children, she was always the smallest in height but not in personality. An extrovert by nature, she came alive in the presence of others. The first little sister to a big brother she worshipped, she tried her darndest to do big things so he would include her. After becoming the big sister to four more siblings, she remembers her first encounter with an emotion so big it refused to be contained by her tiny frame.

“I was maybe eight years old pushing my little sister on a swing and I started to cry. The feeling of joy in that moment overwhelmed me. I remember thinking, ‘Why am I crying when I’m so happy?’”

The joy would not stay in. It was literally squirting out of her body into the park.

Her six-foot-four bigger-than-life father was the magic maker in the family – a man with a giant personality and big dreams that he pursued with gusto. After the family lived for a season in a bustling city, he dreamed of moving them to a spacious swath of land where they could build a dream home and live simply away from the madness of the big metropolis. She was almost eleven when they made it to the 900-acre property where they started to make plans for the perfect space.

Because her dad was so grandiose at times, no red flares went up the day her parents called all six children into their master bedroom for an announcement. The oldest was 13. The youngest was one. She was eleven. And the announcement sounded like this:

“Today we found out Daddy has cancer. And we have decided that whether I live or die, we want my life to glorify God.”

From Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King (Intervarsity Press)

Hannah Miller King remembers having no idea what cancer was but understanding that it must be a big deal because the prospect of “death” was introduced as a possible outcome. Her dad was just forty years old.

“On the one hand, I remember thinking, ‘what’s the big deal. It’s an illness. He’ll go and get treatment and he’ll get better.’ On the other, I saw the reaction of the people visiting and calling after he made the announcement. It was serious in a way I didn’t understand completely.”

For the next four years, her father fought for his life, literally undergoing countless procedures and treatments. The kids were absorbed into various homes when the parents were away pursuing a cure. Home schooling came to an abrupt halt for more than a year. Eventually, in the midst of the chaos, the kids were enrolled in a local school. Spiritually, the family, church community and friends were fighting for her father’s life through prayer and fasting and everything they knew to do to invite a miracle.

“My family was a church-going family before this started. But something grew dramatically in those years. We went from being a family of faith to our faith being a matter of life and death. The best way I can sum it up is that our faith became intensely real. The way my parents prayed changed. They way they spoke about God changed. I had this sense that if everything had gone just the way I wanted it to, I might have thought of God as a nice accessory to my comfortable life.  I might have loved Him because He was doing all the things I wanted him to do. But my father’s statement that he wanted his life to glorify God whether he lived or died threw a wrench in my spiritual maxims.”

He was 44 and she was 14 when he died. The family home was foreclosed weeks later. She was angry at God for refusing to heal her father. But her anger left this crack in its hot logic – her dad’s love of God grew the sicker he got. Every unanswered prayer seemed to deepen that love. One of his journal entries captures the Godward trajectory of his illness.

“Lord, I seek intimacy with you over healing – over anything in this life. Please teach me… Lord I seek you because you are worthy of my seeking. I don’t seek you because of what you can do for me.”

This subtle subversion to the script that she didn’t understand – trusting and loving God even when we don’t understand His ways – took years to unpack. But the seed was planted in the first announcement of his illness – God will be glorified whether he survived cancer or died from it.

Hannah’s initial grief was so deep that it morphed into a commitment to reject joy. Any act of joy risked betrayal of her dad’s memory. She started to expect tragedy over happiness as a default. She struggled to believe that there was any good in store for her future. She turned to various forms of escapism – alcohol, relationships, self-harm [cutting]. She gained a cumulative feeling of homelessness, of displacement and of disconnection in the presence of others. She internalized it as shame and felt like an outsider wherever she went. But God… but God relentlessly and consistently sent hope in ways she couldn’t deny His largess.

A Sunday school teacher showed up and started to tutor her so she could catch up on all the lost classes. The pastor of her church befriended her and took the initiative to become a father-figure. He was consistent and safe and relentless in his intent to help a child that needed what he had to offer. When it came time for college, her family had little money and no real means to send her. On the very last day of a 40-day prayer time and partial fast over her ability to go to her dream school, a scholarship offer arrived in the mail. In what seemed like the scarcest time of her life, God was filling the space with His provision and abundance. Her world had shrunk so substantially; yet in that smallness, God was looming large.

When she arrived on campus, the very first church she visited had a robust college ministry. A campus minister had been praying for a reliable babysitter. She offered the job to Hannah who was desperately wondering how she was going to make ends meet. That minister and her family made Hannah a part of their family, almost as adoptive parents, feeding her physically, emotionally and spiritually.

"In college, the local church functioned like a family. I was being re-familied there. I was seeing how multifaceted the church is in its ordinariness. Normal people were living normal life relearning together what it is like to be sisters and brothers and sons and daughters and to build healthy relationships in God’s family. We were learning how to fail and forgive and confess and seek. It was messy but it was beautiful. I could see a healthy future in the way God had laid out His kingdom and provided others to walk in righteousness. This place was re-futuring all of us. It was giving us all a plausibility structure for our future lives."

As she healed from the trauma of losing her father, she also started facing other areas of her life that had been buried, including some sexual abuse. She learned through the church that forgiveness is only a piece of how we deal with abuse. How that abuse affects our behaviors and our thoughts and our coping mechanisms has to be addressed as well. The man who would become her future husband decided to buy a book she was reading on biblical healing from abuse so that she’d have someone to talk to.

“I realized, he was taking a stake in my story. He put my needs over his. He refused to take advantage of me in my vulnerability. I remember thinking, ‘this is what real love is. What healthy intimacy is. Someone who won’t take advantage of you when you are diminished. This is the kind of person I want to marry.’”

And marry they did. Both, feeling called to full time ministry, they enrolled in seminary in Dallas Texas. It was there that the mystery of her father’s prophetic word about loving God even if he wasn’t healed started to bear fruit.

“We were worshipping at a church that offered communion every Sunday. Weekly I was invited to walk to the front, empty hands outstretched, and look at a person in the eye and hope to be fed. All my childhood insecurity rose straight to the top. I felt so vulnerable. God was giving His broken body to my broken body. God was giving His body that was broken for me to heal my wounds. I was rehearsing bodily what I knew doctrinally; by grace I am grafted into God’s family. The welcome to this family was profoundly undoing. It confronted my fear of abandonment, displacement and shame. Over time, I found a sense of belonging at a table full of broken people just like me. So many of my questions have been answered, but not all of them. And I know now that some of them won’t be until Christ comes again."

In her book, Feasting on Hope [Intervarsity Press, release date February 2026], Hannah does a masterful job of explaining how communion broke down her remote attachment to the prosperity gospel, her hidden belief that her performance impacted God’s acceptance of her, and how the “already but not yet” truth of Christianity is realized in the tension between the answers to prayer we understand and in the future of our restoration after we die.

Her book is her own psalm of response to the question, ‘does God set a satisfying table in the wilderness of our unanswered questions that deepens our love for Him?’ Her life psalm gives a resounding yes.

“I’m still asking why? It’s a question I’ve learned to carry with me like a piece of jewelry I never take off. It’s simply there, so much a part of me that I rarely notice it anymore. But this unanswerable question has also become like an expansive room in which I live, and where I have met God more profoundly than if our prayers had been answered as we hoped. In the wilderness of why, we come face to face with God. In communion with Him, He sustains us with His broken body until the day we meet Him face to face.”

Hannah Miller King, Ridiculous Hour Podcast Episode 73

Like her father, she continues to move toward God for the sake of His presence more than what He might do for her. Her unanswered why’s have deepened her faith.

Now as a tiny 5’2” Anglican priest who wears a priestly collar, she stands before God’s spacious table welcoming broken people to communion with Christ. She offers Christ’s body to broken people as food in the wilderness that satisfies the tension between the already and the not yet. Increasingly, she sees small as an opportunity to experience the largess of God. She has become tiny in a spacious place welcoming all to His enormous table.

To Start the Responsiveness Mission:

Find the table reservation card in your Mobile Mission Pack. If you aren’t receiving free packs in the mail with our signature equipping pieces, click here and we’ll get it out to you. If you want them monthly, just say the word.

Begin the challenge by writing your name on the reservation card.

Do you know that there is room for you at the table? Do you know that you are tiny in a spacious place so that God can fill the void? Will you consider placing that reservation card in a place where you can see it all month long [or all year long to set a great tone for 2026]. Will you literally sit at a physical table one time each day this month and ask the Lord to show you His presence in your own wilderness of why?

Contiune the challenge by finding the prayer card in your Mission Pack. Write one of your “why” questions on that card. Consider asking someone from your faith-family to pray with you over it. If you scan it and email it to us or snail mail it, we will pray with you all month long.

As we spend a month responding to these prompts, will you ask yourself this vulnerable question. When is the last time you stood empty handed at the Lord’s table to receive His body broken for you?

Amen? Amen!