Healing is often portrayed as a straight line. You get sick. You get treated. You get better. There’s a before and an after, a clear point where everything is supposed to shift back into place.

It is widely understood that surviving a life-threatening experience changes a person completely. Whether welcomed or not, that change settles in. The real questions often come later, when life slows down, and no one is watching.

Lisa Crites’ story is one shaped by loss, illness, and an unflinching honesty about what it means to endure. As a cancer survivor and the author of Beautifully Unbroken, she does not present faith as something tidy or reassuring.

Some inventions begin in laboratories. Others begin in boardrooms. Lisa F. Crites’ story began in a bathroom, standing inside a trash bag, trying to shower after a mastectomy.

For Lisa Crites, grief didn’t come in a neat, single chapter. It came layered. First, the sudden loss of her mother. Then, before the ground had time to settle, a breast cancer diagnosis.

Hospitals, doctors, nurses and their team of clinicians are usually phenomenal in getting patients through surgery. They are less prepared for what happens once you go home.