A couple looking out over the ocean and two boys walking a sunlit forest path

Stories written in the middle.

Memoirs about love, suffering, faith, and what remains when life no longer feels certain.

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Featured Books

Two memoirs written from inside the same storm.

Where Are You, God? — hardcover edition
Book One

Where Are You, God?

My Wife Has Cancer

Where Are You, God? is not a book written from the safety of hindsight. It is a memoir written in the middle of uncertainty, during hospital visits, difficult conversations, moments of anger, fragile hope, and the quiet exhaustion of watching someone you love suffer. When Michael's wife, Lynn, is diagnosed with cancer, the questions that follow are not abstract theological questions, but deeply human ones: Where is God when prayer feels unanswered? What happens to faith when fear becomes part of daily life? And how does a family continue loving each other through the unknown?

Written with honesty, restraint and emotional clarity, the book moves between reflections on marriage, fatherhood, faith and grief, while never losing sight of the ordinary moments that continue even in crisis. Rather than offering easy answers or polished inspiration, the memoir invites readers into the tension of living without certainty, and the emotional exhaustion of continuing to love each other while living without certainty.

At its heart, Where Are You, God? is a story about love that refuses to disappear in the presence of suffering. It is for readers who have wrestled with doubt, sat beside hospital beds, carried questions they could not resolve, or simply tried to hold onto hope when life no longer made sense.

Coming Soon
Read an Excerpt
Available on Amazon at launch

Letters to Our Boys — hardcover edition
Book Two

Letters to Our Boys

Words We Never Wanted Left Unsaid

with Lynn Janse van Rensburg

Letters to Our Boys began in a hospital room. While undergoing treatment for stage-four cancer, Lynn started writing letters to her two sons, small memories, reflections, and pieces of herself she was afraid they might one day be too young to remember. What followed became something larger: a deeply personal memoir written by both parents, not about dying, but about the ordinary and extraordinary things they hoped their boys would carry with them into adulthood.

Written with tenderness, honesty and emotional clarity, the book gathers stories from before the children were born, the woman Lynn was before she became “Mommy,” the marriage that shaped their family, the habits, jokes, griefs and small inherited gestures that make a life recognisable to the people who love us most. The book does not try to offer grand lessons. Instead, it lingers on the quieter things: school lunches, hospital visits, old photographs, late-night conversations, and the fierce desire of two parents to make sure their sons always know they were loved.

At its heart, Letters to Our Boys is about memory, legacy and presence. It is a book for sons growing into men, for parents trying to leave something true behind, and for anyone who has ever feared that the people they love might one day forget the sound of their voice, the shape of their laughter, or the ordinary beauty of who they were before life changed.

Coming Christmas 2026
Read an Excerpt
Available on Amazon · Christmas 2026

These books are written in hope. Written in fear. Written in love.

These memoirs don’t promise easy answers.
It offers company.

Excerpts

A glimpse inside the journey.

Honest words from the pages — about love, faith, suffering, and the things we leave behind.

Where Are You, God?

I can hear my wife sobbing in the bedroom.

It is a Friday afternoon in April. The Monday is a public holiday, the long weekend has just begun. I am at the dining room table when it begins. She is at the other end of the house, and her grief comes down the hallway in waves.

I do not move. My hands are on the table. The cloth under them is cold.

This is the same table where she sat with Daniel the night before and did his homework…

— From the Prologue, The Page We Missed

Where Are You, God?

It was not the crying I have heard before. I have heard her cry in the hospital the night after her lung biopsy, when I sat beside her bed in ICU. I have heard her cry after scans. I have heard her cry in the middle of the night when she thought I was asleep.

I have heard her cry at funerals. I have heard her cry over the small, ordinary hurts of life that build up over time. I have heard her cry because she missed her mother. I have not heard this.

This is the sound of a woman grieving the mother she can no longer be.

— From the Prologue, The Page We Missed

Letters to Our Boys

The first book was about what happens to a marriage and to a faith when the prognosis arrives in October and the chemotherapy begins in March. This one is about the family that existed before that, and the family that continues to exist around it, and the things we would like our sons to carry into the rest of their lives.

We are writing this book because the boys are young.

We are writing it because, on more than one occasion, Lynn has said to me, in a voice she does not use for anything else:

The boys are so young. If I die now, they will not remember me.

I have promised her, every time, that I will not let that happen. This book is one of the ways I am keeping that promise.

— From the Preface, Why We Are Writing This

These are not stories of answers. They are stories of showing up. Of holding on. Of loving anyway.

About

Michael Janse van Rensburg

Michael Janse van Rensburg is a husband to Lynn and a father to TJ and Daniel. These books were not written from distance or hindsight, but from inside a season none of them chose.

He holds a Doctor of Theology from the University of the Western Cape, awarded in 2024 for a dissertation exploring suffering, faith, and the question of how a good God can still be present in a world that hurts. At the time, those questions were academic. A year later, they became deeply personal.

When Lynn's sarcoma returned in 2025, sixteen years after she had first been treated and declared clear, the family's world shifted. Out of that upheaval came these books, written in an attempt to hold together what suffering was trying to pull apart, to honour the woman at the centre of their lives, and to leave behind words their sons can one day hold in their hands.

These books are not about having the answers. They are about showing up — when the answers don't come.

The Woman Behind These Pages

Before there were books, there was Lynn.

A wife. A mother. The quiet centre of a family built over nearly two decades of marriage, ordinary routines, shared laughter, school lunches, late-night conversations, road trips, prayers, disappointments, and the thousand small moments that slowly become a life together.

These pages exist because she exists.

Not as a symbol of suffering, but as a deeply loved woman whose presence shaped the emotional world these books were written from. Much of what fills these pages, the tenderness, the grief, the fear, the humour, the longing to remember, began with the life Michael and Lynn built together long before illness entered the room.

When cancer returned, one of Lynn's deepest fears was not death itself, but being forgotten by the boys while they were still young. Letters to Our Boys grew from that fear, but even more from love, the desire that TJ and Daniel would always know who their mother was, how deeply she loved them, and how present she remained in the middle of uncertainty.

These books are, in many ways, a record of a marriage, of loving someone not only in the beautiful chapters of life, but also in the frightening ones.

Michael and Lynn

Why I Write

Because stories can carry what we cannot. Because honesty is its own form of faith. Because love deserves to be remembered.

“I wrote these books for Lynn. I wrote them for our boys. And I wrote them for anyone who has ever loved someone through the unknown.”

Updates

Stay connected.

A quiet way to stay close to the journey behind the books.

“These books are being written in real time, in the middle of uncertainty and love. If you'd like to follow the journey, I'd be honoured to have you alongside us. — Michael Janse van Rensburg

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Behind the Pages

Occasional reflections on writing, family, faith, and the questions we continue to live with.

Updates when the books become available

A quiet word here as each memoir becomes ready to read.

Contact

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Whether you have a question, a kind word, or simply want to say hello — your message is always welcome.

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A Note to Readers

These books come from a very personal place.

Messages are read by Michael, and we do our best to respond personally.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Email
michael@writtenforlynn.com
Based In
Western Cape, South Africa

Thank you for caring enough to reach out. It means more than you know.