WH Chief of Staff Susie Wiles announces she is cancer-free

When Fox News posted on X that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles says she’s cancer-free, the first response I saw at the time was sarcastic: “She should retire in celebration.” The second congratulated her and her family. The third said simply, “God is great!!!”

When President Trump chose Wiles to be the first female White House chief of staff, he called her “tough, smart, innovative” and “universally admired and respected.” She is the daughter of NFL legend Pat Summerall, who credited her intervention with his ability to overcome his alcoholism. Wiles says very little in public, but Politico calls her “the most powerful woman in Washington.”

I’m not surprised that responses to her health update are as divided as the electorate itself. More Americans than ever before say Americans are greatly divided on our most important values. Seemingly, the only thing Republicans, Democrats, and Independents agree about is that Americans lack agreement on such issues.

If you’re like me, the constant barrage of partisan divisiveness is wearying and discouraging. You might worry for the future of our consensual democracy in a time when half of the electorate considers the other half to be immoral and worse.

But such fears are evidence of a worldview known as “solipsism,” one that is a constant temptation, but also a constant threat to our flourishing and our faith.

Allow me to explain.

“To be is to be perceived”

George Berkeley (pronounced “Barklay”) was an Irish philosopher and clergyman and was among the most-cited thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe. In his view, our experience of the world is just that—our experience. Accordingly, as his most famous saying asserts, Esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived.”

To illustrate: Think about your body right now. What limbs, organs, or functions come to mind? I am thinking about my fingers tapping on my laptop keyboard, my breathing, and the feeling of my back against the chair. None of this was in my mind before I asked my question.

In fact, I am not even experiencing what I just described, but rather what my mind interprets as a result of these sense impressions. Nothing outside this process exists in a present-tense way for me at the present moment—not my car in the garage, my bed in the bedroom, and so on. Only when I walk into the garage does my car enter my conscious world. The rest of the time, it exists as an idea but not a tangible reality (a concept known as “solipsism”).

Berkeley’s critics immediately countered: But what about physical realities that change outside our perception of them, such as a fire that burns down in the fireplace even when we are not in the room to watch it? His response made the point he was attempting to reinforce: everything exists in the mind of God.

If all of this is new to you (and probably, to this point, frustratingly irrelevant), join the crowd. Even if we don’t know (or care) how to refute Berkeley’s logic in a logical way, we just “know” that there is a material world outside our experience of it.

But do we, really?

When athletes thank God for victory

In Psalm 90, Moses prays: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (vv. 1–2). He testifies that the Lord has been Israel’s “dwelling place” even when they were enslaved in Egypt, generations before they came to their promised land.

This is because he was God before he “formed the earth and the world.” He created the space-time continuum and transcends both. As CS Lewis helpfully illustrated, if we think of time as a line on the page, God is the page.

Here’s the problem: Humans tend to associate the reality of God with times when we experience his reality personally. We are spiritual solipsists. We post on X, “God is great!!!” if we get news we like, but not if we don’t. We give him credit when he answers our prayers as we wish, but less when he doesn’t.

When athletes succeed in competition, they often publicly thank the Lord. I don’t remember ever seeing a losing athlete interviewed who brought God into the conversation.

But faith declares to sight that God is always what he has ever been (cf. Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8). And sight declares to faith that if God is truly God (by definition the most supreme being there is), he cannot change or he would at times be less than God. Thus, he must always be what we sometimes know him to be.

This does not mean that we cannot express our disappointment with God to God. Jonah (Jonah 4:1–3), Job (Job 10:3), Moses (Numbers 11:15), David (Psalm 22:1), and Jesus from the cross (Matthew 27:46) are excellent examples to follow in this regard. In fact, the Lord himself encourages us to “argue it out” with him (a literal translation of Isaiah 1:18).

But our conversation does mean that he is no less God when he disappoints us than when he does what we wish.

“When you feel abandoned by God”

When CS Lewis’s wife died after a battle with cancer, he wrote in A Grief Observed:

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about him. The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”

When difficult things happen in the news or in my personal life, I dread the same conclusion. The God whom I have praised for all his blessings in my life is no longer that same God, or he wouldn’t have allowed the tragedies I grieve. He is whatever I experience him to be in the moment, and in the hard moments, he is less God than I hoped. Or so I fear.

Rick Warren knows personally what I mean, and on a level I cannot imagine: his twenty-seven-year-old son Matthew died by suicide in 2013 after a lifelong battle with severe mental illness and depression. I therefore place great stock in his assertion:

When you feel abandoned by God yet continue to trust him in spite of your feelings, you worship him in the deepest way.

How deeply will you worship your Lord today?