Digging Deeper: None Will Weep

On Monday night, I received the notes for Sunday’s sermon. I looked over them, read the Scripture verses, then put my phone down.

“Thursday,” I thought. “I won’t know by then.”

As I pondered the deadline, I thought back to April of 2025. That was when my brother was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He was scheduled for surgery, and they removed half of his colon. He refers to what remains lovingly as his semicolon.

But being stage four, cancer still remained on his liver. He consulted with doctors at Emory who rejected him as a candidate for surgery. Undeterred, he continued searching until he found someone willing to perform it: a group at Vanderbilt University. God bless nerds who are smarter than me.

That’s where he is right now as I type. The family group chat is full of well-wishes and prayers. There are memes of Dr. Nick, the spectacularly unqualified doctor from The Simpsons. Mr. Bean is somehow in the operating room, laughing with his mask pulled down while everyone else looks horrified. And someone posted the Monty Python hospital sketch where the doctors seem more concerned with the expensive machine that goes “Bing!” than the patient. My family has never been particularly good at being serious for very long. It’s one of the things I love about us.

What struck me Monday night was the irony of Luke 7. I had just come home from my parents’ house where we talked about my brother Connally. I asked my mom, a professional worrier, how she was doing leading up to the surgery.

And she didn’t talk about the doctors, the facilities, advances in modern medicine, or Vanderbilt. She talked about God. Although not a widow, it was a mother whose only hope in her son’s survival was in God. I felt that story told by Luke, in a totally different way.

The ingenuity of man is not stopping the end of the universe; it is certainly not bringing me back from the dead to a glorious body. We can fight death. We can delay it. Sometimes, through extraordinary people and extraordinary medicine, we can buy years from it. But we cannot defeat it.

The attorney was right that we end up in the ground. He was wrong that it’s the end. At Nain, Jesus told a grieving mother not to weep before He gave her son back (Luke 7:13). The surgeons at Vanderbilt are buying my brother time, and I’ve prayed for decades more of it. But time isn’t what any of us finally need. We need a last word, and God is the only one who has it. And when He speaks it, none will weep.

Ask Yourself:

• Who is on your heart right now that you can pray for today?
• When you’re afraid for someone you love, where do you go first?
• What would change in the way you live this week if you truly believed death is a period and not a question mark?