Interview with Tracy and Michael Balboni

What led you to write Walking Lois Home? Has the church lost something in its calling to care for the sick and the dying? 

The basic story we are trying to tell in Walking Lois Home is that the church has in some ways been co-opted by the larger culture in its denial of death. 

Social psychologists and others have described Western culture as a culture of death denial. Over the last century, illness, dying, and death have increasingly been moved out of everyday life and into hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions. When death is no longer regularly in front of us, we naturally think about it less. 

At the same time, our culture places enormous emphasis on flourishing, success, health, and living well. Those are good things. But for that story to remain convincing, death often has to be pushed out of sight. 

We think the Western church has been influenced by this as well. Churches understandably want to be growing, flourishing communities with a positive and hopeful message. At its extreme, this can become a health and wealth message, but even in more ordinary churches there can be a subtle tendency to talk much more about living well than dying well. 

That makes serious illness and death harder for the church to respond to with the fullness of the gospel. We may be very comfortable praying for healing and miracles, but less comfortable talking about letting go, preparing for death, or finding Christian hope when someone will not recover. 

The gospel has something profound to say not only about how to live, but also about how to suffer, how to die, and how to hope in the face of death. 

The Story Behind Walking Lois Home 

Tell us how this topic became personal for you. 

We have been engaging these questions since our early training days, when Tracy was a medical student and Michael was a seminary student. Very early on, we began to see that the separation of medicine and faith was creating deficiencies on both sides, both for medical professionals and for the church. 

But everything became much more personal during COVID when we began walking with our friend Lois Meinhardt through metastatic cancer. 

We did not know Lois very well at first. She had attended our church as a child but had been away from church through much of her adult life. Shortly before her diagnosis, she reached out to reconnect. That was when Michael first met her and gave her his phone number. About a year later, after her cancer diagnosis, both of us became increasingly involved in her spiritual and medical journey. 

Eventually Lois moved into our home with our adolescent children and us for the final months of her life. We thought she might be with us for only a few weeks because she was already on hospice and very sick. But after moving into our home, something began to change. She experienced new hope and care, and what we expected to be a few weeks became a six-month journey of caring for her spiritually, emotionally, and physically. 

We discovered that it is one thing to care for someone who is seriously ill as a physician or pastor. It is another thing altogether to care for someone in your own home, day after day, over many months. 

During that time Lois, knowing we were academics and writers, began telling us that we needed to write her story. She came to see what she was experiencing as something that might help other people. In many ways, Walking Lois Home began with her invitation to share what all of us were learning together. 

How We Can Better Love the Sick 

Who are you writing for and what do you hope they gain from reading the book? 

We wrote the book for a wide Christian audience. That includes people facing serious illness themselves, family members and friends caring for them, pastors and laypeople, and Christians working in medicine and healthcare. 

For someone facing serious illness, we hope Lois’s story and the stories of others provide companionship and perspective for many of the questions and struggles that naturally arise. 

For Christian physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, we want to offer theological concepts and practical tools to help them navigate difficult conversations. Christians sometimes interpret illness, healing, miracles, and medical decisions in ways that can be confusing or even internally inconsistent. We draw on research to identify some of those tensions and offer ways healthcare professionals can engage patients and families both respectfully and theologically. 

The book is also very much for pastors and ordinary Christians who find themselves around the sick, whether as family caregivers, friends, or people involved in visitation and congregational care. We offer practical shepherding skills for difficult conversations and for engaging the spiritual questions that often emerge during illness. 

And we look at how churches can care for the sick as a community. Every congregation has strengths and weaknesses in this area. We offer ways for churches to evaluate their practices and develop a more robust circle of care around those who are sick and dying. 

Our hope is the same for all of them: that the book will be theologically rich while also being very practical. 

Michael and Tracy Balboni’s book Walking Lois Home: Living Out Our Christian Call to Love the Sick and Dying is published by Baker Books. Drawing on rigorous research and years of pastoral and medical experience, the book weaves together medical, theological, and pastoral wisdom—framed by Lois’s story—to equip individuals, congregations, and patients to care for the seriously ill and dying with faith, grace, and love. 

Michael Balboni is co-director of the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard and a pastor in Boston. 

Tracy Balboni is a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard.