A Lesson on Living Free
Brent Beshore on Ben Sasse, surrender, and the faith we build in the quiet days.
Sunday, April 26, 2026
A Lesson on Living Free
I’ve known Brent Beshore for more than 5 years now.
He’s one of those rare friends who makes you think harder, pray deeper, and hold your life a little more loosely every time you talk to him.
Last week, he wrote something that stopped me cold.
It was about Ben Sasse, the former senator.
Now dying of stage four pancreatic cancer.
Five forms of it.
Three to four months to live.
Brent watched Sasse sit across from a reporter and radiate something most healthy people never touch: freedom.
Not the performed kind. The real kind.
Sasse called his cancer “a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.”
A gift, he said.
Because it killed something in him that was worse than the cancer.
The illusion that he was in control.
That his accomplishments were the point.
That the life he’d built was the thing.
Suffering doesn’t build your foundation. It tests the one you already have.
That’s something from Brent’s article that keeps echoing in me.
Because it’s true of every hard season I’ve walked through.
The crisis never gave me faith.
It revealed what I'd been building in the quiet, ordinary days nobody was watching.
Brent put it this way:
“The cancer didn’t give him something new. It revealed what was already there by stripping away everything that wasn’t.”
Read that again.
And ask yourself:
What would be left in you if the scaffolding came down?
We wait for the sledgehammer when we could hand things over now.
Sasse told his kids he wished he'd honored the Sabbath more.
If a man who ran a university and served in the Senate wishes he’d rested more, what does that say about the pace most of us keep?
The Apostle Paul wrote, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Sasse is living that verse in real time.
And it’s making everyone who watches him ask what they’re still holding onto.
You don’t need a diagnosis to live free. You just need to start letting go.
Brent writes with this kind of honesty every week.
He’s a father, a husband, a leader carrying real weight, and a believer wrestling with real life.
If you want more writing that’s grounded, human, and pointed toward Jesus, go follow him.
You’ll be glad you did.
God bless,
