Craig Cunningham was a pastor. Lead pastor of Shadow Rock Church in La Quinta, California. The kind of man who spent his life telling other people that God was in control.
Then God gave him a chance to find out if he believed it.
The Double Diagnosis
It started with his wife, Tricia. She needed surgery to remove a brain tumour. While Craig was processing that — while Tricia was in recovery — his own test results came back.
Advanced colon cancer. The cancer had already spread to his liver. Approximately fifty tumours. His doctors told him the survival rate for his cancer type was 15% at best. They gave him six months to live.
December 2019. The Cunninghams thought it might be their last Christmas together.
The Surgeon
A member of a Facebook group directed Tricia to City of Hope, one of America's leading cancer research hospitals. There, she found Dr. Yuman Fong — an internationally renowned liver cancer surgeon. Most surgeons would have looked at fifty liver tumours and said there was nothing to be done. Fong saw a possibility.
If chemotherapy could shrink the tumours enough, Fong believed aggressive surgery might save Craig's life. It was not a guarantee. It was a chance.
Craig started chemotherapy. The church started praying.
The Surgery
The chemotherapy worked well enough for Dr. Fong to operate. He removed half of Craig Cunningham's liver. Half. The surgery was extensive, high-risk, and required the kind of precision that only a handful of surgeons in the world could deliver.
Craig survived the operation.
The Recovery
There were setbacks. Minor recurrences that required additional chemotherapy, radiation, and ablation. This was not a single dramatic moment where cancer vanished overnight. This was a war fought over months and years — with medicine on one side, prayer on the other, and God holding both.
But Craig Cunningham is alive. Years past a six-month prognosis. The man who was told he would not see another Christmas has seen several more since then. He is still pastoring. Still preaching. Still telling people that God is in control — but now with the authority of someone who tested it personally.
What They Say About It
"They're calling it a miracle."
That is not a phrase Craig Cunningham uses lightly. He knows what medicine did. He knows what Dr. Fong did. He knows what chemotherapy and radiation did. But he also knows that fifty liver tumours and a 15% survival rate do not typically end with a pastor standing in a pulpit years later, alive and declaring the goodness of God.
What This Means for You
Sometimes healing comes in a single moment — a scan that shows nothing where there was something. And sometimes healing comes as a long fight where God shows up through the hands of surgeons, the precision of medicine, and the prayers of a church that refused to give up.
If your fight is long, if the setbacks keep coming, if the road to healing looks more like a war than a miracle — keep going. Craig Cunningham's story says that God does not always heal in an instant. But He heals. And He uses everything — doctors, drugs, scalpels, and the prayers of ordinary people — to do it.
