Amazing Courage: Letters to My Father on Conquering Fear Through Faith

Amazing Courage is a fearlessly honest account of one man’s effort to save his father. Lawyer and former atheist Kyle Zunker was twenty-nine years old, just a few years out from professing faith in Christ, when he received the news that his father had esophageal cancer. It was a phone call he would never forget. It was the first time he heard fear in his father’s voice. While the pair had a close relationship, Kyle was unsure about his father’s faith. Their conversations had rarely strayed from the comfortable topics of sports and career, until he received the call. Kyle wrote his father a series of letters to encourage him with the good news of the gospel as he underwent chemo and radiation treatments. In the letters, Kyle revealed how fear had dominated his life as an atheist and trapped him in a secret, lonely nightmare he had kept hidden for years. With the raw and unedited letters as its core, Amazing Courage shows what it looks like to choose faith in the moments we have the most to fear. From having a panic attack in a university bathroom during an exam to the arduous climb up a mountain at mile 60 of a 100-mile footrace, Kyle shares his experiences both of being overwhelmed by and of conquering fear. Woven throughout these stories is the continuous thread of God’s presence and promises, although not always visible to Kyle at the time. Told from a perspective only possible for someone who wrestled with God as an atheist, Kyle reveals that faith is a choice we are each invited to make, even when we have doubts. Letter by letter and story by story, Amazing Courage builds into a beautifully candid dialogue between son and father, and man and God. In a quiet and calm but relentless and driving voice, Amazing Courage shows how the hope of faith prevails over the despair of fear, every time.