His daughter called before my visit.
She said, Dad said something about God last week I’ve never heard come out of his mouth. I’m worried he’s losing his faith.
Theodore was 81. Former deacon. Former elder. Daily Bread devotional still on the nightstand. When I walked in, he was in his recliner, looking out the window. He looked at me and said:
I’ve been a faithful man my whole life. Did everything I was supposed to do. And now I’m sitting here waiting to die. And I don’t know what any of it was for.
His daughter thought that was a crisis.
What I saw was a man telling the truth for the first time in 81 years.
Not testimony truth. Not the polished version you’d say in Sunday school. Real truth. The kind that’s been sitting behind your ribs for decades, waiting for a moment when there’s nothing left to lose.
Theodore hadn’t lost his faith. He was meeting it honestly for the first time.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after 35 years of sitting with people at the end of their lives: the questions that break through at the end aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs that the performance has finally stopped.
And when the performance stops, something real gets a chance to begin.
God is not threatened by your honest questions. He wrote them into Job. He put them in the mouth of Jeremiah. He let David scream them in the Psalms. He didn’t need any of those men to have it together. He needed them to be present — even when present meant angry, confused, or silent.
There’s a version of you that knows exactly what you really think about all of this. Not what you’re supposed to believe. Not what you’d say in front of your family. The truest thing.
That’s the version God wants to talk to.
Say it. He can hold it. He’s held worse. He held it from the cross.
“I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”— Job 7:11
A Moment to Reflect
What is the question you’ve never let yourself ask out loud? Not the polished version. The real one.
A Prayer
God, I’ve spent a long time saying the right things. Today I want to say the true thing instead. I don’t have it worked out. But I think you already know that. Hear me anyway. Amen.
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