We all know the refrain from Tim McGraw’s 2004 hit: “Live like you were dying.” The song romanticizes a terminal diagnosis as the catalyst for skydiving, bull-riding, and speaking sweeter to the ones we love—a bucket-list mentality that YOLO culture creates.
Today’s society insists that taking immoral risks should liberate us. Remembering that life is temporary, seize every thrill, chase every experience, and refuse any restraint that might cramp your final chapter. The result is therapeutic hedonism: immoral risks become “living fully,” fleeting pleasures are deemed courageous, and the serious work of stewarding eternity well is forgone. Death awareness, in this telling, becomes an excuse to waste life more efficiently.
In December 2025 former Senator Ben Sasse posted a raw note on X: “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.” As we know, advanced pancreatic cancer carries a death sentence measured in months. Sasse named death what it is, “a wicked thief” and “the bastard that pursues us all,” yet in the months that followed, through clinical trials at MD Anderson, a dramatic 76 percent reduction in tumor volume from the experimental drug daraxonrasib, punishing treatments, and the launch of his podcast Not Dead Yet, he has offered something far more radical than any YOLO sentiment. He has modeled the Christian art of dying well.
This public witness is a stinging indictment of the American church’s long abandonment of a theology of suffering. For decades, too many pulpits have exchanged the biblical mandate to “take up your cross daily” (Luke 9:23) for therapeutic self-help, prosperity-adjacent platitudes, and a gospel that sounds suspiciously like self-actualization. We have rarely taught believers how to suffer faithfully like Job, how to die with hope like Stephen, or how to view affliction as an expected vocation. The fruit is predictable: congregations that increasingly mirror the culture’s phobia of death instead of confronting it and Christians who freeze when trials and tribulations come their way. Suffering is then outsourced to secular therapists, hospitals, or glamorized self-help Instagram graphics.
Into this vacuum steps Ben Sasse as a flesh-and-blood witness to what the church should have been teaching all along. Sasse entered what he has called his “own winter of suffering,” with tumors filling his torso, back pain that once felled a farm-raised Nebraskan, and an initial prognosis of three to four months. Doctors identified not only pancreatic cancer but lymphoma, vascular cancer, lung cancer, and aggressive liver involvement. Yet he has fought back, enrolling in cutting-edge immunotherapy trials, while refusing every form of false optimism. “I’m not going down without a fight,” he has said repeatedly. Here is the biblical tension lived out in public view: we hate death and labor against it with every instrument of common grace and medical science God has given, yet we know death is inevitable and ultimately surrender it to the One who has numbered our days (Psalm 90:12). Sasse’s candor demolishes the modern lie that we ourselves can delay death or escape mortality.
What gives Sasse’s witness weight is that he refuses to let the diagnosis collapse into despair. Instead, he has turned outward in a deliberate act of redeeming the time (Ephesians 5:16). His podcast, co-hosted with Chris Stirewalt, explores living with “gratitude, grit, and joy” even when the clock is plainly visible. The title itself borrows Monty Python’s irreverent gallows humor—a spirit Sasse and his family have deliberately cultivated. They pass around “the irreverent tape,” laugh through the morphine haze, and refuse to let the disease dictate every conversation—true defiant joy of a people who have seen “a great light” breaking into darkness (Isaiah 9:2). As Sasse explained to Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge, “‘Redeem the time’ in my theology means it is a great blessing to be able to live a life of gratitude to God by doing stuff that tries to benefit your neighbor.” That includes wrestling with the eternal questions—the relationship between sin, death, and a broken world—while still hugging his wife in the morning and loving his children.
This faithful dying is the culmination of a life already lived faithfully. During his tenure as U.S. Senator from Nebraska (2015–2023), Sasse demonstrated a principled conservatism rooted in the same theology now sustaining him. He earned consistently high marks from conservative scorecards for defending the unborn, opposing taxpayer-funded abortion, and working to reform entitlements so that future generations would not be crushed by debt. He advanced national-security legislation, including key cybersecurity reforms through the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and co-sponsored measures to prevent adversarial nations from acquiring critical American technology. He pushed ethics reform and sought practical bipartisan wins on issues like expanded COVID testing access. Yet he never mistook the Senate floor for the kingdom of God. His books, The Vanishing American Adult and Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal, warned against cultural fragmentation, digital addiction, and the epidemic of loneliness long before his diagnosis. Even in Washington, Sasse kept his eyes on the “little platoons” of family, church, and local community, refusing to let national rage supplant neighbor-love.
Most powerfully, Sasse anchors himself in the full counsel of God rather than hollow spirituality. In his New York Times interview with Ross Douthat and his 60 Minutes appearance, he returns again and again to Philippians 1:21: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He told Douthat he was “incredibly blessed to be quickly at peace” after the diagnosis. He does not pretend he feels ready—“I’m not the toughest guy,” he admits—but he asks the right question: “To whom would I go?” The answer is the God he calls “Daddy, Abba, Father.” Death remains the final enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26), but it is not the victor. “There will be no more tears,” he says, echoing Revelation 21.
This public faithfulness stands in stark contrast to the Ars moriendi, Latin texts on the historic “art of dying” that once formed every generation of Christians. Medieval manuals and Puritan pastors prepared believers to meet death with repentance, faith, and hope. Families visited the sick and walked through graveyards so that children would internalize their frailty: “Go into Burying-Place, children; you will there see graves as short as your selves.” Suffering was never an outrage against personal autonomy; but a participation in Christ’s redemptive work (Colossians 1:24). John Paul II’s Salvifici Doloris captured this truth with precision: pain, when united to Christ, becomes salvific. Sasse, a serious student of history and a devoted father, not only speaks but embodies this ancient wisdom in real time. He is teaching his own children, and the American public, that a well-lived life is the only adequate preparation for a well-died one.
None of us receives an engraved invitation with our expiration date. Some will live long, some will hear life-altering words tomorrow, some will be taken suddenly at any moment. Sasse’s story forces the question we spend most days evading: How are we living now so that we might die well then? Are we abiding with the One who has placed eternity in our souls and an expiration date on our fleshly body? Are we cultivating the friendships that will sustain us in the final trial? Raising children who know the gospel as living hope? Stewarding our vocations, marriages, politics, and local communities with the urgency of people who know the clock is running?
Ben Sasse’s greatest contribution may not be his Senate tenure. It may simply be the way he is finishing his race. A man dying well on full public display is exactly the radical act this fearful culture needs.
We are all on the clock. The question is whether we will redeem the time.
