29/01/2026
Philip is a pastor and writer who has shared his stroke story and reflected on how his Christian faith supported him through recovery. We recognise the importance of faith, spirituality or secular beliefs - whatever form they take - and the role they can play in healing, meaning and resilience after stroke.
From Philip, "On Sunday, August 4, 2024, it was our church's fifteen year anniversary. I'd been there since the start, and had been a pastor for the past seven years. It was meant to be a day of celebration. As we drove to church, our daughter Junie was nearly six months old, and sleeping in her capsule. Serena was driving. Just before 9am, driving along the Riverside Expressway, I was about to reply to a message, but I couldn’t lift my left arm.
“I can’t move my arm.”
“What do you mean, like you slept on it?”
As I tried to explain, the left side of my face began to fall, my speech slurred, and my left leg went dead. Even at 34 years old, something in me knew the signs. “I think it’s a stroke.”
There was a traffic jam ahead, but Serena pulled onto the on-ramp, and we were at the Royal Brisbane Hospital in a few minutes. We pulled into emergency, and Serena ran in to get help. For some reason, I tried to get out of the car on my own and fell face-first onto the pavement. A minute later I was on a stretcher, surrounded by doctors. As I was lifted onto another stretcher and eased into the CT scanner, I prayed the first words that came to mind, on repeat, with half my mouth fallen: “I lift my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? It comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”
The words of Psalm 121 had always been a comfort to me, but the question posed in it seemed more real than ever.
When they wheeled me back, Serena placed Junie on the bed beside me, and I broke. I couldn’t hold her. I could barely smile. I remember thinking: I don’t care if I can never work again. I just want to be able to hold my daughter. And: If I die right now, Junie won’t remember me. They were live questions.
The MRI confirmed a lacunar infarct in my basal ganglia - a small area, the communication hub between the left and right sides, the highway crossing of the brain. We sat, waiting for the thrombolysis to loosen the clot. I remember in those hours, as absurd as it seems now, going into my Google Drive and giving Serena access to the novel I’d been writing. It was called Maple Diction, and it was about a father writing letters to his infant daughter, because he was afraid that he might not be alive for much longer. I felt two things in that moment: I wanted to make sure that Junie could read it one day, and I felt sure that, if I could ever write again, that this moment was a line in the sand. Everything I’d written was the first half of
the story, and the book would start again from there.
It took about eight hours for me to feel any movement in my left side; first, I could swing my leg from the thigh; then, I could twitch my thumb. After a long and sleepless night in the neurology ward, little electric jolts began to travel down my arm and leg, and muscles came back online. By morning, without even standing yet, I knew: I can walk again.
Telling my story
There’s a power in hearing other people’s stroke stories. Not because they’re the same - they never are - but because they help us orient ourselves. They remind us that what feels singular and isolating might still be shared.
After having Junie, I was struck by how many mothers (and women hoping to become mothers) have said to me, “I love hearing birth stories, because every one is different.” It isn’t just variety that draws them in.
These stories echo our own. They help us knit our experience into something larger. They help us feel understood, known, and located.
The writer Meghan O’Rourke describes chronic illness as “camouflaged grief.” When what has happened to us is invisible, when it isn’t immediately legible on our bodies, we’re forced to carry the grief inside us.
Strokes leave scars on the brain, the heart, and the soul that can remain unseen even to the person who carries them. But they still ask to be spoken, because grief always has to find expression - if not through our words, then it will always boil over in other areas of our lives.
I spent six days in hospital. A few days after the stroke, almost all of the damage of the stroke was invisible. I went from health to paralysis to walking again in less than a day. But I know that it will take me years to process what happened that day.
On my first night home, I insisted on bathing Junie again. Sitting beside Serena as she fed her to sleep, the week finally caught up with us. We cried tears of grief, but also of gratitude.
Six weeks after the stroke, I cracked. I was trying to push myself, to do the kinds of things we used to do. Serena and I were meant to meet friends for lunch. Halfway there, my body told me I couldn’t go. Speaking required intense focus. My left arm felt leaden. My leg was dense. I started crying uncontrollably.
It wasn’t really about lunch. It was about powerlessness. About the fear beneath it all: that my brain will recover when it recovers, that my life will crawl toward equilibrium when it decides to, and that there may be scars I will never fully locate.
“I’m not sure if this body is my home, and I’m not sure if it ever was my home.” Maple Diction.
Just like I knew that I could walk before I stood up, for those first few months I knew that I couldn’t write. I could write words. I’d jot down phrases, sentences, poems. But I knew that I couldn’t write my book.
“These words are my refuge… they’re an affirmation to myself that there is humanity in me and beyond me, and it can still find coherence.” Maple Diction.
After a few months, though, I returned to the book, and it became a powerful voice in my recovery. The line in the sand meant that I had a freedom of narrative. I had to complete the story, but I gave myself permission to write whatever I needed to. It helped me to articulate my griefs and my fears, and my place within a larger story.
Amidst everything that’s happened in the past eighteen months, I’ve felt anchored by my Christian faith. We all need bigger stories to make sense of our lives. But for me, the Christian hope has helped me make sense of it all. One quote spoke to me powerfully throughout it all, from the pastor and philosopher James K. A. Smith: “God is a mosaic artist who takes the broken fragments of our history and does a new thing: he creates a work of art in which that history is reworked such that the mosaic could only be what it is with that history. God’s grace goes back to fetch our pasts for the sake of the future.”
Every loss, every deficit, every lunch you couldn’t make, every cell that's died in the stroke. There’s hope for those broken fragments, to be gathered up into a new thing, into a whole, into a greater story. Or, as the father in Maple Diction writes: “A part of my brain has permanently died, and another area has taken over its function."
That much is true. But even that seems absurd, that we’re capable of such things. The new
brain tissue knows its role and what’s dead can become alive again - what’s dark can find
its way back into the light. That’s my great hope.”
Telling your story
If you’re recovering from a stroke, and if your body no longer feels like home, I hope that you can find ways to share that experience. It doesn’t have to be writing. But any means to give a voice to the grief that’s been camouflaged in your body. It always takes time. But the process always starts with sharing it.
But tell your story, even if it’s unfinished. Write it, speak it, pray it. Let others help carry the things you can’t even name yet. Because, by God’s grace, there’s always value to what’s been lost. And as we share our stories together; as the things that have been camouflaged are truly seen; as our stories are knit into a greater story, we can work to find that hope together.
