Pray Me Out Like That

Stronger Than Death

Eight years ago I got a call.

A “gun-for-hire” wedding.

A guy from London with a British accent thick enough you could spread it on toast — marrying a younger woman from Iowa.

A piano player. A musician. Talented in computer science. Skilled enough to work from home back when “work from home” still sounded exotic.

They’d moved to Corpus to get close to the beach.

Bought a house on the island.

And on a freezing November day — the kind of rare South Texas cold that makes your iPad freeze up, shut down, and quit on you mid-ceremony — I stood on the sand and married Ken and Sonia.

Ken and I were in wool suits.

Sonia, the bride, in a lacey white dress.

Sonia? Not so lucky. She was cold.

I was doing the ceremony from memory because my iPad had tapped out, and about halfway through, Ken leaned in, looked me dead in the eye, and in that heavy British accent said:

“Rev — you could speed this up, ehh?”

We all burst out laughing.

Because we were freezing.

But their love was a fire.

So I did what I’d done a hundred times before. The gun-for-hire pastor. Pronounced them husband and wife. Shook hands. Drove home. And fully expected to never see them again.

Until one Sunday at Grace.

There they were.

Ken was not hard to miss — easily 6’2”, 6’3”, maybe 6’5”.

(I’m 5’11”. Do you know how much better my sermons would land if I were 6’2”?)

And just like that, they started coming.

Sundays. Social events. Christmas Eve.

The gun-for-hire became the pastor.

The strangers became the family.

That’s the thing about life, beloved.

You think you’re saying goodbye.

God is saying not yet.

Then 2024 Came.

And Ken — only 71 — began to show signs of dementia.

They kept coming as long as they could. Ken tried. Lord, he tried. But the disease haunted him. It stole pieces of him I’d come to love. The accent stayed. The smile stayed.

But the man was being slowly carried away, one memory at a time.

And what I saw in Sonia in those months —

I want you to hear me on this.

What I saw in Sonia was a woman who loved her husband fiercely.

Not sentimentally.

Not romantically.

Fiercely.

The kind of love that doesn’t write poetry — it changes sheets.

The kind of love that doesn’t post about it on Facebook — it sets the alarm for 3 a.m. medications.

The kind of love that gives up its own calendar, its own friendships, its own freedom — and never asks for a thank-you.

Then I left Grace.

And in the chaos of that leaving, I missed saying goodbye to Ken and Sonia.

I didn’t get to tell him I loved him.

I didn’t get to tell her thank you.

Two Weeks into John 2.0

This week — two weeks into my return — an angel at the church texted me and told me Ken was on hospice.

I called Sonia immediately.

Can I come by?

She said yes.

I drove to the island.

To the same stretch of beach where eight years earlier, we’d shivered through vows.

I pulled up to the house — their house, the one they’d bought to be near the water — and Sonia opened the door.

We talked.

Not long.

I saw the photos on the walls — Ken and Sonia in a thousand frozen moments.

Trips.

Holidays.

That wedding day.

The two of them younger and laughing and lit from inside.

I saw the hospice bed.

I saw the oxygen tank.

And I saw Sonia.

A woman who had handed over the last year and a half of her life — the entire last year or two — and had not, would not, put Ken in a home.

Because eight years earlier on a freezing beach, she had said five words she meant down to the marrow:

In sickness and in health.

And she meant it.

She is meaning it.

She was meaning it as I walked through her door.

The Prayer

I stood by Ken’s bed.

We prayed a prayer of forgiveness.

We prayed a prayer of eternal salvation.

And I want to tell you something. I want you to hear me clearly. I am not embellishing. I am not preaching. I am witnessing.

As the prayer ended — Ken ascended into heaven.

We prayed him out.

We quoted John 14:

“In my Father’s house are many rooms… I go to prepare a place for you… And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

And Jesus came.

And Jesus took him.

Right there.

In a hospice bed.

On an island.

A few hundred yards from the spot where eight years ago he’d told me to “speed it up, ehh.”

And friends — let me tell you something I cannot shake.

On that freezing beach eight years ago, Ken wanted me to speed it up.

He thought the ceremony was too slow.

He thought life was moving too slow.

He was wrong.

Life sped itself up just fine.

Eight years.

A wedding. A church. A house. A laugh. A disease. A hospice bed.

The same beach.

The same wife.

The same accent.

And the man who had asked me to hurry through his vows —was suddenly out of time.

The room was quiet in a way I will never forget.

Sonia was a mixture of every emotion a human being can hold at once.

Relief. Grief. Gratitude. Devastation. Love. Loss. Peace.

All of it.

All at the same time.

And I looked at her and said the truest thing I knew to say:

“I hope somebody prays me out like this when it’s my time to go.”

I stayed a while, until family and hospice came.

The Drive Back to Suite 214

I made it to the car before I broke.

Cried the whole way back to suite 214.

Not sad-cried.

Honored -cried.

The kind of crying that comes when you realize you’ve just been allowed to stand on holy ground in your own town, in your own week, with your own people.

The kind of crying that comes when God whispers,

This. This is why I called you back here.

Because here is the thing nobody tells you about pastoring:

You don’t get called back to a church for the buildings.

You don’t get called back for the budget meetings.

You don’t get called back for the Christmas Eve crowd or the Easter pageant or the parking lot conversations.

You get called back for Ken and Sonia.

You get called back so that when a man you married on a freezing beach is taking his last breath eight years later, you are the one in the room.

That’s the call.

That’s always been the call.

The Mist Is Rising.

Hear me, beloved.

James said it: “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

Solomon said it: “Vapor of vapors. All is vapor.”

Ken just lived it.

Seventy-three years.

A British boyhood.

A career across an ocean.

A marriage.

An island.

A church.

A disease.

A goodbye.

A mist.

That’s all any of us are.

Hot breath on a cold morning.

Visible for a moment.

Gone the next.

And friends — listen to me carefully.

Eight years ago on that freezing beach, Ken wanted me to speed it up.

Eight years later, the only thing I want to do is slow it down.

That is the cruel joke of the mist.

We spend our young years begging life to hurry up.

We spend our old years begging life to slow down.

And life — life does what life always does:

It speeds itself up whether we want it to or not.

The wedding flies by.

The babies grow up.

The career ends.

The diagnosis comes.

The hospice bed shows up in your living room.

And one day — one ordinary Tuesday — somebody is praying you into the arms of Jesus, and you cannot believe how fast the whole thing went.

And here is what God put on my heart driving home that day, and I cannot let go of it. I will not let go of it. I am writing it on the wall of my office:

Today is the only day you have.

You don’t have tomorrow.

You don’t have next week.

You don’t have “when things calm down.”

You don’t have “after the project.”

You don’t have “once the kids are grown” or “once we retire” or “once life slows down.”

Life has a way of speeding up whether we want it to or not.

Life does not slow down. Life ends.

You have today.

That’s it.

That’s the gift.

That’s the assignment.

That’s the whole thing.

So Don’t Waste It.

Don’t waste today on grudges.

Don’t waste today on small hassles — the traffic on SPID, the wrong order at Whataburger, the neighbor’s dog, the thermostat war, the text that didn’t get returned. Most of life is small hassles. They will not matter at the hospice bed. They will not matter when somebody is praying you into heaven.

Don’t waste today being too busy to call the person you love.

Don’t waste today rehearsing the thing somebody did to you in 2019.

Don’t waste today being too proud to say I’m sorry.

Don’t waste today being too scared to say I love you.

The mist is rising, friend.

The mist is always rising.

You will look up one day and the morning will be gone.

What Ken and Sonia Taught Me

Forgive everyone of everything.

Not because they deserve it.

Because the mist is short.

You do not have time to drag a grudge into year sixty, seventy, seventy-three.

You do not have time to carry resentment to a hospice bed.

The people who love you fiercely will be the ones holding your hand at the end — and the people you refused to forgive will not even know you are gone.

Forgive. While the mist is still rising.

Love your people because love is stronger than death.

This is the headline.

This is the whole sermon in one sentence.

Sonia loved Ken with a love that was stronger than dementia, stronger than exhaustion, stronger than her own preferences, stronger than her own comfort, stronger than death itself.

Song of Solomon says it: “Love is strong as death.”

Sonia put a footnote on it.

Sonia said: Love is stronger.

What I Want You to Hear

Church — and I’m preaching to myself first —

It is an honor to pray a man into the love of his life at a wedding.

It is a higher honor to pray him into the arms of Jesus at his death.

To do both for the same man, eight years apart, on the same island, with the same wife in the room —

That is not coincidence.

That is calling.

That is one reason God allowed me to be called back to Grace.

That is why I’m here.

To Ken

Wherever you are in those many rooms, I want to say it on the record:

I appreciate you.

I appreciate your love for soccer.

I appreciate your love for all things British.

I appreciate that ridiculous accent that made every sentence sound like a BBC documentary.

I appreciate the way you loved Sonia.

And I am honored — past every word I have for honored — to be the one who prayed over you.

A witness, twice over, that love is stronger than death.

And to You — Reading This

Today is the only day you have.

Don’t waste it.

Call the person.

Forgive the thing.

Say the words.

Love your people stronger than death — because that is the only love that survives the mist.

And when your day comes —

may somebody pray you out like that.

In a quiet room.

With Jesus already on His way.

The best is yet to come.

Your Hope Dealer,

Rookie Roberts