Picked Up
I live with an expiry date. I was picked up anyway. The work is not finished
A word for the one in the waiting room — and for the one sitting beside the bed.
This is the written companion to A Soft Place to Land, Episode 2. The episode is the room. This is the page.
I am going to say the medical sentence once, and then I am going to leave it where it belongs.
In the spring of 2025 I was told I had terminal cancer. Radiation. Chemo. Then an operation that took the esophagus and joined my stomach to my throat. I lost a hundred and ten pounds. There were days when the complications were more dangerous than the original word on the page. I live now with an early date over my head.
I will not dress that word up. I also will not build a stage around it. It is a medical fact. It is not my personality now. I am still a man with a chair, a calling, a family, and work that was started a long time ago.
When people hear a sentence like that, they often look at you as if you have already left. They lower their voice. They run out of small talk. Some disappear because they do not know what to do with their hands. Some rush in with slogans. Both are understandable. Neither one is very useful.
I did not want a slogan. I did not want a war metaphor. I was not interested in becoming an inspiration poster. I wanted to live the days I had, and I wanted to finish what I had started.
The question the date asks
If your time is shorter than you planned, what is still worth doing?
For me it was not a bucket list. It was not a speech. It was the ministry I began at thirty-four. Jaxson Harlan. The writing. The songs. The quiet room we keep trying to make for other people. I had started something that was not about me, and I was not willing to let an expiry date be the last editor.
I want to say that carefully. You do not have to produce a masterpiece to justify your remaining days. Some people will spend this season sitting in a chair by a window, and that can be holy too. I am only telling you what rose up in me. The work was not finished. I still had breath. So I kept going.
“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.” – Philippians 1:21–24
Paul was not pretending the grave was a rumour. He named both rooms. Then he named the work that was still his if he stayed. That is as close as I can come to describing the inside of this season. I do not feel much real fear. I feel urgency. Pity is not useful. The date is not the whole story.
If you are reading this with a diagnosis in your pocket, you do not have to copy my list. You only have to ask the same question honestly. What is still mine to do, and what can I set down?
What I did not expect
I will give you the inventory without making you sit through a chart. The body became a different shape. Food was no longer a simple thing. Anyone who has lived near a hospital already knows the fluorescent hours, the waiting, the way a person becomes a project.
Here is what I did not expect.
I have spent most of my life feeling like the black sheep. The outsider. Almost invisible. I do not say that as a wound I am asking you to bandage. I say it because it is true, and because what happened next surprised me.
- People picked me up.
- Doctors and nurses treated my life as if it still mattered. I am grateful for them in the ordinary way — as a man who knows that skill and mercy can live in the same pair of hands.
- My wife stayed. My daughters stayed. Neighbours showed up. People in my community did the unfashionable work: rides, meals, messages, sitting in a room when sitting was all that could be done.
And I felt loved. I felt appreciated. That was strange. I had practiced being the one on the edge of the photograph. Then the floor dropped, and the room was full.
I do not have a tidy explanation for why love is easier to see when you are flattened. Maybe we finally stop performing long enough to notice who was already standing there. Maybe people get braver when the situation is no longer polite. I only know what it felt like. After a lifetime of feeling unseen, I was seen.
“Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.” – Mark 2:3–4
The man on the mat did not get to Jesus by becoming impressive. He got there because four people decided his life was still worth the dust and the inconvenience. That is what picked up looks like in Scripture. Not a slogan. A mat, a roof, and friends who would rather make a mess than leave a man in the street.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labour: if either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.” – Ecclesiastes 4:9–10
If you have ever been the outsider in your own family, or in a church, or in a town, you know how deep that surprise goes. It can undo a story you have been telling yourself for decades. The story that says you are extra. That if you vanished, the furniture would not move.
I am here to tell you the furniture moved. People rearranged their days. They picked me up.
That does not make cancer a gift. I will not insult you with that sentence. Cancer is a thief. What I will say is this: the thief did not get to steal the fact that I was loved. And it did not get to steal the work.
Even to your old age, I will carry you
The people who showed up were not the whole mercy. They were the hands. The carrying started further back than any kitchen.
“Even to your old age and grey hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” – Isaiah 46:4
“We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” – 2 Corinthians 1:8–9
An expiry date is not the same thing as a cancelled life. It is a different kind of clock. It can make you cruel, or it can make you honest. I am trying to let it make me honest.
Honest about the body. Honest about the fear I do not feel much of, and the tenderness I feel a great deal of. Honest about the ministry I still want to finish. Honest that I needed to be picked up, and that I was.
“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.” – Job 19:25
That is the sentence this house stands on. Not that the diagnosis was a misunderstanding. Not that the date went away. That the Redeemer is still standing, and a man with a short calendar can still tell the truth in His name.
If you are in the waiting room
- You do not have to turn this season into a performance. You do not have to write a speech. You do not have to become nicer than you are, or tougher than you are.
- You can say thank you to the people with the training and the calm hands.
- You can let your people stay.
- You can ask for a ride without apologizing for three paragraphs.
- You can do the next piece of work that is still yours — a call, a page, a prayer, a pot of soup, a quiet presence — and leave the rest.
- You are not a problem to be managed. You are not an inspiration assignment for other people. You are a person. You can receive help without becoming small. You can be grateful without pretending you are glad this happened.
And if you have felt invisible for a long time, consider the possibility that the story is incomplete. I thought I knew what I was in the room. Then the room changed, and I found out I had been loved more than I could see.
I cannot promise your people will show up the same way mine did. I can promise you are not foolish for hoping they might. And I can promise you are not alone in this chair, even if your kitchen is quiet tonight.
The work, if you are standing next to the bed
Do not wait for the perfect thing to say. Say, I am here. Then stay. Bring the ordinary help. That is how a person gets picked up.
The four men in Mark did not preach through the roof. They dug. They lowered. They got their friend as close to Jesus as their arms could manage, and then they let the Lord do what only the Lord can do.
If you are the one who is sick: tell one safe person the true sentence. Not the brave version. The true one. I am tired. I need you. I am still here.
If you need words before God, they can be plain.
I am not finished. I need help. Thank you for picking me up. Help me do the next true thing.
That is enough language. God is not waiting for a better draft.
The Podcast
I told this in a quieter room first. A Soft Place to Land, Episode 2, is called Picked Up. It is a spoken hour with no chapter-and-verse on the air — the same story, said across a table. If this page found you, the episode is there for anyone who needs to hear a voice and not only a paragraph.
The promise is the same in both rooms. I live with an expiry date. I was picked up anyway. The work is not finished.
If there is a date on your calendar you did not choose, it does not get the last word. There is still work that can be yours. There are still people who know how to pick a person up. And there is still a Redeemer who will stand upon the earth when every short calendar has run out.
The date is not the name.
Being carried is not the same thing as being finished.
