Before I start, I should preface this by saying that for all the criticism I have of Chandler's beliefs, I wish him the best and hope that he and his doctors triumph over the odds. But this story is as much about belief as it is about one man's struggle against cancer and so those beliefs are useful topics for this subreddit.

One thing that I found really weird were things like this:

Chandler is facing brain surgery...Questions start to haunt him. Am I going to wake up and be me? Am I going to wake up and remember Lauren?

I thought that Christians such as Chandler believed in immortal, immaterial souls that held (for lack of a better word) their personalities, memories, and so on. I can see a Christian worrying that brain surgery will leave him dead, but if everything that makes up Chandler as a person is distinct from his brain, why be concerned about functions of the soul?

And then there's this:

Whatever happens, he says, is God's will, and God has his reasons. For Chandler, that does not mean waiting for his fate. It means fighting for his life.

So God has a plan, which apparently includes not only Chandler getting cancer, but Chandler fighting that cancer. So literally everything that happens or doesn't happen, everything that Chandler does of his own free will or refuses to do is part of God's plan. There is literally no event, action, or decision, hypothetical or real, that could not be said to be part of God's plan. So just what is the value of claiming that there's a plan behind everything? It's like having a weather model that fortells clear, cloudy, raining, snowing, dry, warm, cold, windy, or calm weather tomorrow.

All this reveals is that although Chandler is a pastor who councils others, he apparently hasn't given much thought to his own beliefs. I can't help but see this as a flaw of Christianity in general, which seeks to promote faith and conformity more than skepticism and criticism.