Craig Groeschel didn’t set out to write a book. He just wanted to help a friend who was grieving.
“She was like family,” Groeschel remembers.
A colleague at his office had finally gotten pregnant after a long season of waiting and hoping. When she lost the baby, the grief was layered with spiritual confusion. A relatively new believer, she didn’t just question what had happened—she questioned everything she had just begun to believe about God.
Groeschel wrote her a letter.
“What started out as a few pages turned into a lot of pages,” he says.
He hoped his words might offer comfort or at least some kind of emotional handhold in a time when the ground had fallen out beneath her. She came back the next day and told him: “This is the difference between me staying in my faith and me walking away.”
That letter eventually became Hope in the Dark, a book that would sit quietly on a hard drive for years before Groeschel returned to it—this time, for himself. When his daughter Mandy got seriously ill and doctors had no easy answers, he went back to what he had written.
“It was crazy how the letter I wrote to someone else seemed like words someone had written to me,” he says. “I cried all the way through it.”
The experience confirmed what he already suspected: this was not a book meant to tie anything up in a bow. It was a book about the absence of resolution. About what happens when your faith doesn’t give you clarity but you still hold on.
And maybe that’s exactly what makes it resonate.
Groeschel’s most personal book is also one of his most unsettling. He’ll be the first to admit it’s not for everyone.
“If your life is going great right now, this book is probably not for you,” he says. “At least not right now.”
What sets the book apart from so many Christian resources is that it doesn’t chase an answer.
“There isn’t a why,” Groeschel explains. “There’s no conclusion, no resolution.”
That’s intentional. The book is based loosely on the Old Testament book of Habakkuk—a short, strange, brutally honest account from a prophet trying to make sense of God’s silence in the face of injustice.
“Habakkuk is one of the most beautiful, powerful and frustrating books in the Bible,” Groeschel says. “Because there’s no ‘and then God does the miracle’ moment at the end. That doesn’t always exist in real life.”
Most Christians are conditioned to expect the opposite. Especially in America. Groeschel calls it “our American version of Christianity”—the quiet assumption that following God should come with a guaranteed reward.
“There’s this implied belief that if I follow God, He’ll allow only good things to happen to me,” he says. “And if He doesn’t, either God doesn’t care or I did something wrong. I think that’s really bad theology.”
That kind of theology doesn’t survive contact with real life. People still grieve. They still battle depression, still get ghosted, still miscarry, still pray for things that never come.
“God may bring comfort,” Groeschel says, “but it doesn’t always work out with a happy fairytale ending.”
One of the most provocative details about Habakkuk, according to Groeschel, is the meaning of the prophet’s name: “to wrestle” and “to embrace.” That tension—honest struggle and stubborn hope—sits at the heart of Hope in the Dark. Groeschel isn’t offering a tidy solution for pain and doubt. He’s offering permission. Permission to ask God why. Permission to say, “This doesn’t make sense.” Permission to struggle with faith without feeling like you’ve somehow disqualified yourself from it.
“What I’m trying to do is give believers permission to go ahead and wrestle with the unanswered questions,” Groeschel says. “But at the same time, to wrestle without letting go of God. To continue to embrace Him.”
For a generation burned out on platitudes and polished sermons, this message lands hard. Millennials and Gen Z have grown up in churches where sermons wrap up neatly and God always shows up in the final act. Groeschel says he’s guilty of it himself.
“Almost every sermon I preach has that ‘God miracle’ at the end,” he admits.
But when he taught through Habakkuk at his church, he tried something different.
“I told them, this book is not a sitcom sermon. It doesn’t resolve in 30 minutes.”
Instead, he let the tension linger. Week after week, the story sat unresolved, frustrating, incomplete.
And people kept coming back.
Why? Because that’s what real life looks like. Not every prayer gets answered the way we expect. Not every story ends with a lesson and a bow. But faith isn’t a formula—it’s a relationship. One that can survive grief, anger, even silence.
That may be the real hope in the dark. Not that God will eventually explain Himself but that He’ll still be there—even when He doesn’t.
So where does that leave us? How do you keep faith alive when you’re swimming in unanswered prayers? Groeschel doesn’t pretend to have a one-size-fits-all answer. But he does believe our foundation needs to shift.
“Our faith can’t be based just on God giving us the desired outcome,” he says. “Our faith needs to be based on who He is—His character, His nature, His goodness, His sovereignty.”
That’s not a faith that sells well. It doesn’t offer bullet points or guarantees. But it’s a faith that can actually hold up when things fall apart. A faith that doesn’t require the universe to make sense in order to still believe God is good.
And that’s the kind of faith more and more Christians are looking for—whether they’re sitting in a hospital waiting room or scrolling through yet another post about someone else’s perfect life. A faith that doesn’t require pretending. A faith that lets you wrestle. A faith that gives you permission to say, “I don’t get this,” and still show up to pray.
It might not be fair. But it’s real. And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.
