Resilience or Resurrection?
Two men, two diagnoses, and the question that outlasts both of them.
I’ve been sitting with two videos for a few days now, and I can’t quite shake them.
The first is actor Eric Dane speaking openly about his ALS diagnosis. The second is Ben Sasse, former U.S. Senator and university president, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. Both men are fathers. Both are staring down serious illness. Both speak about fighting. Both speak tenderly about family.
On the surface, they sound similar. But the more I’ve listened, the more I’ve felt the gap between them — not in character, not in courage, but in the ground they’re standing on. And I think that gap matters more than almost anything else I could write about.
I want to be careful here. Eric Dane is not a villain. He was a man facing a brutal disease with more dignity than most people could muster. I’m not writing this to tear him down. I’m writing it because what lies beneath his words — and beneath Ben Sasse’s words — is a question every single one of us will eventually have to answer. When everything I’ve built my life on is stripped away, what remains?
Eric Dane: The Spirit That Cannot Be Taken
In the interview, Dane describes what illness does to you. It strips life down to “pure survival.” It pulls you out of regret about the past and dread about the future, and forces you into the raw present moment. There’s something genuinely wise in that. The past is gone and the future is uncertain — but this breath, this day, this person in front of you? That’s real.
His central conviction is that ALS can take his body, but it will never take his spirit. Resilience is his word for it. His superpower, he says. The legacy he wants to leave his daughters is to fight “with every ounce of your being,” to cherish every moment, and to hold tight to the people who just show up.
I find that genuinely moving.
Christians sometimes get so eager to make a theological point that we forget to be human first. So let me say plainly: the impulse to love your children well, to face suffering without bitterness, to refuse to let a disease define your spirit — that reflects something true about what it means to be made in God’s image. Genesis 1 tells us every person carries that dignity. Theologians call this common grace — the way God’s goodness shows up even outside of explicit faith, in acts of courage and love and beauty all over the world. We should honor that, not mock it.
But…
There’s a question that keeps pressing on me as I listen to Dane, and I can’t help but ask it.
What happens when the spirit falters?
ALS is relentless. It doesn’t just weaken muscles, it silences them. Speech goes. Movement goes. Eventually, breath goes. What does “indomitable spirit” look like when the body it lives in can no longer express it? And even if a person maintains their inner dignity all the way to the end — what then? Dane seems to speak of death as simply “the end of your days.” If that’s true, then everything dissolves. The love, the legacy, the courage — it all eventually fades into the silence of memory, and then into the silence of being forgotten entirely.
I’m not saying this cruelly. I’m saying it because I think it’s the honest endpoint of the worldview he’s describing. Philosophers call it secular humanism — a framework that takes suffering seriously, refuses to pretend death isn’t real, and calls for dignity in the face of it all. At its best, it’s deeply admirable. But it carries a tension inside it that I don’t think it can resolve.
If there’s no transcendent anchor — no God who holds the story together, no resurrection that rewrites the ending — then love is a beautiful accident, courage is a gesture against an indifferent void, and legacy is memory waiting to be forgotten. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes — himself no stranger to suffering and hard thinking — arrives at exactly this conclusion when he takes God out of the picture: “All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 2:16). He’s not being nihilistic for sport. He’s being honest. Without an eternal horizon, even the most dignified life ends in the same silence as every other.
The urgency to “live now” is beautiful. But when it’s driven purely by the pressure of knowing there’s nothing after this, it’s less a philosophy of life than a cry in the dark.
Ben Sasse: Too Small to Save Myself
Ben Sasse speaks from entirely different soil.
He doesn’t minimize what he’s going through. He calls it horrible. He calls death “the last enemy” — which is a phrase he borrows directly from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (15:26). And that’s worth pausing on, because it’s a strange and honest thing to say. It’s not the language of someone who has spiritualized their suffering into something tidy. It’s the language of someone who knows the thing he’s up against is genuinely terrible — and who also believes, deeply, that it has already been defeated.
Where Dane draws on inner resilience, Sasse draws on something outside himself. He talks about cancer “shattering idols.” He speaks about the painful, clarifying process of having false securities stripped away. He quotes Tim Keller, who said near the end of his own life that he wouldn’t trade the depth of prayer forged in his cancer diagnosis for his former health. That’s not naive optimism. That’s the testimony of a man who’d discovered that suffering, in the hands of a faithful God, can do what comfort never could.
Sasse uses words like imputation and justification — theological terms that can sound like seminary jargon but actually carry enormous weight. Here’s what he means: imputation is the idea that Christ’s righteousness is credited to us. It’s not earned by us, but received as a gift. Justification means being declared right with God, not because we’ve achieved some level of moral goodness, but because of what Jesus accomplished at the cross on our behalf. Sasse is saying, as plainly as he can, I’m not trusting my own track record. I’m trusting Someone else’s.
That’s a profoundly different posture than resilience.
He also talks about owning grave plots and visiting them. Which, I admit, sounds strange at first. But there’s an old tradition in Christian spirituality called memento mori, “remember you will die,” and it’s not morbid so much as clarifying. Standing at a grave, for the Christian, is not standing at an ending. It’s standing at a threshold. The grave is not the final word on the body; it’s a seedbed. That’s not wishful thinking — it’s the hinge on which the entire New Testament turns.
Paul puts it this way in his second letter to Christians in Corinth: “For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17).
I want to be careful not to move past that too quickly, because it’s easy to hear “momentary light” and feel like Paul is dismissing real pain. He isn’t. He wrote those words after being beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and left for dead. He knows what suffering costs. What he’s doing is holding it up against something so incomprehensibly vast that even the worst suffering becomes, in comparison, light. Without that comparison, suffering is crushing. With it, suffering is not erased, but set within a story that has a morning after the dark.
Sasse’s “stiffer stuff” isn’t a more durable version of human willpower. It’s the anchor of knowing that the One who raised Jesus from the dead is the same One holding him now. His security doesn’t depend on whether his spirit stays strong. It depends on whether God is faithful. And on that question, he has no doubts.
Two Horizons
Let me put the contrast plainly.
Both men tell their children to fight. But they’re not fighting the same battle or toward the same horizon.
Dane’s framework, at its core, says: the present moment is everything, because eternity is silence. Meaning must be found here, in this life, before the lights go out. There’s urgency in it. There’s even beauty in it. But the urgency comes from scarcity.
Sasse’s framework says: live now, fully, in light of what is coming. The resurrection morning redeems every moment of suffering that came before it. The urgency comes not from scarcity but from abundance — from knowing that this life is real and matters, but that it’s not the whole story.
That difference is not merely emotional. It’s ultimate. It’s about what is ultimately real. And if the gospel is true — if Christ is actually raised — then bravery alone, as beautiful as it is, isn’t enough. Because bravery cannot turn a grave into a doorway. Only resurrection can do that.
The Gospel Speaks a Better Word
I want to say something carefully here, because I don’t want to sound like I’m standing at a safe distance, lobbing theological grenades.
I’ve sat with people who are dying. I’ve watched what happens when the body starts to fail, when pain wears down resilience, when the self that someone has relied on their whole life starts to slip. And I’ve seen that inner strength alone is not a sufficient foundation for that moment. Not because people aren’t strong enough. But because what they’re up against is bigger than any of us.
ALS silences voices. Cancer erodes bodies. Dementia can fracture the very selfhood we’re supposed to rely on. What happens to a philosophy of inner resilience when the inner self can no longer hold it? If there is no one outside of us holding us, we are left with nothing.
The gospel doesn’t ask us to be stronger. It tells us we are loved by Someone who is. And that changes everything.
It says to the person lying in the hospital bed: You are not alone. Your pain is not random or meaningless. Your death is not the final word on your life. You are not walking into annihilation; you are walking toward a resurrection!
It says to the father or mother trying to leave something solid for their children: the greatest gift is not an example of grit. It’s what Peter calls “a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). Not courage in the face of extinction, but confidence in the face of eternity. Those are not the same thing.
The resurrection of Christ is the hinge on which all of this turns. I want to be direct about that. If Christ is raised, death does not have the final word. If Christ is raised, our bodies matter and they will be raised too. If Christ is raised, suffering is not the last chapter of the story. It is the penultimate one. And what follows it is described in Scripture as a weight of glory that makes everything before it look light.
That is a promise we hold onto tightly:
“Death has been swallowed up in victory…thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” — 1 Corinthians 15:54, 57
A Word for the Rest of Us
You may not be facing a terminal diagnosis right now. But you will face mortality, whether your own or someone close to you. And what you believe about death will shape everything about how you face it.
I’m not writing this to win an argument. I’m writing it because I believe the gospel is true, and because I think that truth matters most when life is hardest. Watching Eric Dane speak about his daughters with such love and care — there’s something aching in it. He’s trying to give them everything he has. I just wish he had more to give.
Resilience is admirable. It really is. But it’s not enough. Not when you’re facing an enemy that has beaten every human being who has ever lived — except one.
And that one exception is the whole point.
Resurrection is better than resilience. Not because it makes suffering easier to endure in the moment, but because it means suffering doesn’t get the last word. It means love is not an accident and the grave is not the ending.
It means that for the suffering and the dying, there is a hope that holds up even when the spirit trembles. That hope is not something we’ve built up inside ourselves, but hope built on what Christ has secured outside of us, in history, on a Sunday morning two thousand years ago, when a sealed tomb turned out not to be sealed enough.
That’s the better word. That’s the “stiffer stuff” I want to build my life — and my death — on.