I Will Not Leave You Orphaned
I've been sitting with a question all week — one that the lectionary readings for this Sixth Sunday of Easter seem to be asking right alongside me: Where does human strength actually come from when everything falls apart?
In John 14, Jesus makes a promise that has always struck me as almost breathtakingly personal. "I will not leave you orphaned," he says. He's preparing to leave, and yet his parting gift isn't a system or a strategy — it's the Spirit of truth, an Advocate who will abide within the people he loves. That's not comfort from a distance. That's presence woven into the fabric of who you are.
And then in Acts 17, we find Paul standing in front of the Areopagus — the intellectual center of the ancient world — and he does something I love. He meets people exactly where they are. He quotes their own poets back to them: "In him we live and move and have our being." Those two passages together set up the question I want to explore today. What does that promise look like with skin on it?
I found some answers in a remarkable set of stories the Deseret News published this past year.
A License to Live
Caroline Klein was 40 years old and Chief Communications Officer for the Smith Entertainment Group in Utah when she received a terminal cancer diagnosis — proximal-type epithelioid sarcoma, a rare and aggressive soft tissue cancer. When her doctor confirmed the tumor was malignant, she looked over calmly and said, "So I have cancer." And when that diagnosis became terminal, she said something I keep turning over in my mind: "I took my terminal cancer diagnosis, and I saw it not as a death sentence, but a license to live."
Three days after that news, her boyfriend proposed. They married in August of 2024. She kept working — helping shepherd in the Utah Mammoth NHL franchise, celebrating the Jazz's 50th season. She traveled. She took her niece and nephews to the national parks she loved. Caroline died on August 21st at the age of 40.
Palliative psychologists describe a recognized phenomenon where, as the timeline of life compresses, the clarity of what truly matters exponentially expands. The brain stops wasting energy on trivial anxieties. What remains is pure, clarified presence. That is a kind of power — not power that makes things easy, but power that makes things clear.
Alchemy — When Grief Transforms You
Roman Ruiz was 22 years old, a Division I track athlete at Utah State University, when he suffered sudden cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for 35 minutes. Brain cells begin dying after four to six minutes without oxygen. He woke from a coma with extreme memory loss and had to relearn how to hold up his head, how to sit, how to walk, how to talk. Six years later, he volunteers as a coach for Special Olympics and his local high school track team. "God has a plan," he says. "Whatever happens in your life, that's God's plan for your life."
Astrid Tuminez, president of Utah Valley University, gave me a word for what Roman experienced — and what she herself has lived. Her husband collapsed and died on a mountain peak in South America in February. And then, while still in the depths of that grief, she had to lead her campus of 46,000 students through the trauma of a public tragedy on her own grounds. She called her process alchemy. "Grief transforms you," she said. "It will alchemize your life. In the shattering, you're going to put yourself back together again."
Alchemy isn't bouncing back. It's what happens when something is placed under so much heat and pressure that its molecular structure fundamentally changes. You don't return to who you were. You become something new.
The Presence Within the Suffering
On September 28th, 2025, a man crashed his truck into a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in Grand Blanc, Michigan, set it on fire, and opened fire on the congregation. Dr. Bridger Frampton ran back into the burning building — then did it again and again. Dr. Jared Hicken was shot in the thigh. His six-year-old daughter was shot in the back. And yet he kept helping others escape, helped the wounded in the parking lot, and kept treating patients at the hospital before finally allowing himself to be treated. First Peter calls us to always be ready to give an account for the hope that is in us. These doctors didn't give a speech. They just stayed.
Jenedy Paige pulled her three-year-old son, Victory, motionless from a swimming pool in 2011. He died seven weeks later. In the years that followed, she channeled that grief into art, running, rock climbing, and eventually competed on American Ninja Warrior six times — going from a goal of one pull-up to completing 19 in a row. She also painted 30 portraits of inspiring women, debuting them on the exact date her son had drowned fourteen years before. "That's the day I became a strong woman," she said. "That was the day God asked me to step up to something super hard."
And the Wilhite sisters — Sabrina and Jessica — were hit head-on by a wrong-way driver on their way home for Thanksgiving. What followed alongside the devastation was an equally remarkable cascade of grace: a former police officer who happened to have a seatbelt-cutting knife he never carries, strangers who stopped to pray on the highway, a hotel that gave the family free lodging for a month. Within three months, Sabrina went from a ventilator to walking on her own. Their mother said it best: "I believed it before. But I know it now. I lived it. I feel it to my bones."
That is the promise of John 14 made visible. Not the removal of the suffering. The presence within it.
The same capacity — to alchemize your pain, to reclaim your agency, to be the presence of grace for someone else — it lives in you too. Listen to the full episode to hear all of these stories in depth.