When your body is failing, where do you find your identity?

Don never hid his faith. From the first moment he walked into my office for therapy, he made it clear: Christ wasn’t just a part of his life — He was the center.

“I belong to Jesus,” he said calmly, like he was stating the weather. “So, whatever this disease takes, it can’t take me.”

He sat beside his wife, quiet and watchful during those early sessions. They moved together as if they had spent decades learning how to be one.

On that first day, Don had only recently received the diagnosis: Multiple System Atrophy — MSA. It’s rare. It usually moves faster than people expect. Over time, it can erode movement and speech, and it can disrupt the body’s automatic functions — swallowing, bladder control, blood pressure, even breathing. There’s no cure, and no proven way to stop or reverse its course.

They were supposed to be traveling. Retirement had barely begun. Italy. Utah. Long, slow mornings with coffee. Instead, they came to my quiet office with soft chairs and an open window.

“We’re not here to be rescued,” Don said. “We just need someone to walk this path with us.”

There were days when they laughed until tears streamed down their faces. I remember one afternoon when Don told a story about his catheter popping off mid-meal at a restaurant. “It just launched,” he said, grinning. “Pee went everywhere.” His wife nearly fell off the couch. “We left a puddle ... and a really big tip.” We laughed until none of us could speak. It wasn’t denial — it was joy that had been tested and found genuine.

Other days were quiet. Heavy with truth.

Once, Don tried to mention his grandson’s birthday, but couldn’t finish. He fell silent, covered his face, and cried. His wife leaned toward him and rested her forehead against his back. She didn’t rush to fix it. They knew how to hold pain. Together. Gently. As if it were sacred.

And in that space — between laughter and tears, between bodily mess and long silences — something deeper began to surface.

Don bore the ache, the wonder, and the weight of being human. In his early years, he built his identity out of familiar parts: his physical strength, keen intellect, meaningful work, and cherished relationships. Together, these formed a kind of circle around him — a cohesive whole that gave his life structure and stability.

It’s what many of us do, often without noticing.

Then came the diagnosis.

His body began to fail. His once-clear mind grew clouded with fear. Relationships, once steady, became strained under the pressure of the unknown. Slowly, the elements that had formed his circle began to weaken. The identity he had worked so hard to hold together began to crack.

As the circle gave way, a deep emptiness surfaced. The achievements, the roles, the activity — none of it could hold him anymore.

And yet, in that unraveling, something unexpected emerged. Not the end of Don’s identity, but the revealing of what had been true all along: God was not waiting at the finish line of self-improvement. He was waiting at the edge of surrender.

Don didn’t respond to that invitation out of desperation. He had already accepted it long ago. But the invitation deepened in those final years.

You could see it in the way he stopped treating himself like a project to manage. He wasn’t fixing himself anymore. He was allowing himself to be loved. Redeemed. Held.

When God meets you there — at the end of your own systems — something shifts. You realize identity isn’t something you build from the outside in. It’s something you receive.

Don began living from that place. Even as his muscles weakened, something eternal grew stronger. He no longer needed to prove himself by what he could do or give. He simply was: a child of God, anchored, eternal. Not because he got stronger, but because Christ had stepped into the broken circle and made him whole from the inside out.

His body was failing, yet he treated it with reverence.

“It’s still mine to care for,” he said once. “Until I’m given a better one.”

His mind remained sharp, but quieter. Calmer. More compassionate. His personality softened into something even more whole. He forgave quickly. Laughed easily. Cried when he needed to.

His wife was by his side through it all — not as a mere caretaker, but as a faithful witness.

“This woman,” Don said once, his voice thin with breath, “has shown me more of Christ than any sermon ever has.”

They didn’t try to escape what was happening. They walked through it together, without fear. Their marriage became a sanctuary — not for pretending, but for presence. In the quiet, in the awkwardness and beauty of decline, love wasn’t lost. It was refined.

Don no longer needed the roles that had once defined him — provider, protector, decision-maker. Those roles had served him for a time, but now they served something greater.

Even his limitations became a kind of discipleship. A daily surrender. A slow, stubborn refusal to let suffering have the final word.

In the final weeks, words became scarce. His breath came shallow. His eyes would drift, then focus.

Sometimes they came just to sit — him and his wife, side by side, holding hands, surrounded by silence and the sound of oxygen. It felt, at times, like Heaven was already brushing the edges of the room.

After he died, his daughter called me.

“Dad always looked forward to being in that room with you,” she said.

I told her what was also true: “He and your mother gave me more than I ever gave them. They taught me how to live and how to die.”

Because they did.

Don didn’t leave this world angry or afraid. He didn’t carry everything he had built into the next life. He carried only what had been made new — the redeemed self. The anchored one. The child of God who had finally become, in the deepest sense, fully himself.

Most of us spend our lives polishing the “workshop” of our humanity — mind, body, personality, roles, relationships — hoping that if we get one more thing in order, we’ll finally feel solid. But those parts, as good as they are, were never built to carry the full weight of identity. They crack. They age. They fail. And if they’re the foundation, the whole structure starts to wobble the moment life gets heavy.

Don’s life reminded me of something simple and stubbornly hopeful: God doesn’t waste the materials. He doesn’t despise the workshop. He just refuses to let it be the point.

The Gospel isn’t God helping you manage yourself better. It’s God remaking you. Paul says it plainly: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6). That completion isn’t just relief. It’s transformation.

And it’s why I keep coming back to this — especially when I’m tempted to measure life by what’s visible:

Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:16–18).