She Asked What He Wanted
The word for Saturday, August 15, 2026 is She Asked What He Wanted.
The anchor verses are John 10:10 and Romans 12:1.
Tim Berry is twenty seven years old and he is a patient at a hospital in Ottawa, Canada.
Earlier this summer he was told something about his condition had changed. The chaplain there is a woman named Roshene Lawson, and she came into his room afterward and said they could focus on how sad and frustrating that was, or they could focus on what he wanted to do with the time.
He told her he would really like to go to a heavy metal concert.
A person in her position had options with that answer.
She could have redirected him. She could have decided that a man in his situation ought to want something more serious, something quieter, something more obviously spiritual. She is the chaplain. Steering the conversation toward eternal matters would have been well within her job description.
She said this about it afterward.
She listened for what would bring him meaning and value. It was not her role to judge that. Her role was to support and listen.
He was too medically fragile to leave the building. So she made a phone call to a man who owns a bar in the ByWard Market, and he said yes right away, and he called a local band, and they said yes right away.
Seven days later they moved Tim Berry's bed into a hospital boardroom. The bar staff hauled in their own lights and the full sound system. The band set up their amplifiers. The nurses painted his nails. Lawson made tickets by hand so it would feel like a real show, and other patients came, and they got tickets too.
The band played for forty minutes and gave him the whole thing. Their drummer said there were no half measures, that if they were doing this they were giving him the full experience.
Tim Berry cried. Lawson asked whether the tears were because it was so loud. He laughed and said no, he was happy.
She said the heavy metal guys were crying too.
Almost two thousand years ago there was a teacher named Carpocrates who taught something that has never really gone away. He taught that the body is a prison. That the world and everything in it was put together by beings far below the true GOD. And that the way up was contempt. The more you despised what is here, the higher you ranked.
He taught that whoever despised this world more than Christ did had therefore surpassed HIM.
Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century teacher who defended the faith against those who dressed up error to look like truth, wrote all of it down so the church would recognize it when it came knocking.
That teaching lives on in a quieter form. It sounds like this. GOD cares about your soul. The rest of it, the body and the noise and the things you love for no defensible reason, is beneath HIS notice, and probably beneath yours.
Open the tenth chapter of John and hear what Christ says HE came for.
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
More abundantly. Not less. Not a narrowed, quieted, more respectable version of a life.
And Paul, writing to Rome, tells them what to do with their bodies. Not escape them. Not despise them.
Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
The body is the offering. It was never the prison.
And GOD did not send instructions about bodies from somewhere safe. HE took one. HE got hungry in it and tired in it and HE died in it. Whatever else that means, it settles the question of whether HE finds the physical world beneath HIM.
Which is why what that chaplain did was not a break from her work. It was the work.
She did not treat a man's own desire as a distraction from the spiritual part of him. She treated it as the way in. She asked what he wanted, and it turned out to be loud, and she went and got it for him.
Somebody in your life is going to tell you what they want this week.
It may be small. It may be something you would not have chosen for them, or for yourself. It may be a thing you privately think they should have outgrown.
You will have an opening right there to correct their answer, or to go get it.
Correcting it will feel like the responsible thing. It usually does. That is what makes it hard to see.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been told that what you love is too small to matter to GOD.
- 🙏 To the one who got hard news this week and has not told anybody what you want.
- 🙏 To the one who has been taught that HE wants your soul and not the rest of you.
- 🙏 To the one sitting in a room where nobody has asked you a real question in a long time.
Grace and Peace.