The speed of the change is its own kind of pain. One moment, life is held together by routines: fast-food complaints, small talk about the weather, the long-running rhythm of family habits. The next, those same routines feel like fossils from an earlier age. Last week I was irritated about ice cream; this week I am helping make phone calls that may be final conversations. The people we dial are not just contacts. They are chapters in my grandmother’s life: her church family, old friends and neighbors, her grandchildren, voices that still remember her as young.
One of those calls was to a dear friend of hers, a woman whose faith has carried her through more decades than I have been alive. I held the phone for my grandmother as they spoke, my hand steadying both the device and, in some small way, the moment. They talked about doctor visits, pain levels, and the confusion of hearing the word “hospice” used in the present tense. Then, almost inevitably, the conversation pivoted toward prayer. Her friend’s voice softened and dropped into the register reserved for blessing and benediction. “You know, honey,” she said, “you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you.”
It is a verse I know by heart. I have heard it quoted from pulpits, youth camp stages, locker rooms, and hospital beds. Philippians 4:13 was one of the great slogans of my evangelical youth, offered as a divine endorsement of confidence and achievement. It floated above graduation speeches and mission trip testimonies, stitched into the emotional fabric of a culture that equated faith with triumph. Back then, “all things” meant anything at all: winning games, passing exams, surviving high school, conquering temptation, changing the world.
Adulthood, and a slower, more attentive reading of Paul, altered that meaning for me. When you sit with the authentic letters—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon—you meet a very different Paul than the one smoothed into sermon illustrations. You meet a man who is often exhausted, frequently afraid, sometimes “utterly, unbearably crushed” to the point that he “despaired of life itself” (2 Cor. 1:8). You hear someone cataloging beatings, shipwrecks, hunger, sleeplessness, and anxiety (2 Cor. 11:23–28), not to impress anyone, but to be honest about what this life has cost him.
This Paul does not sound like a motivational poster. He sounds like someone trying to keep going.
When he says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” he is not standing on a stage with a microphone; he is sitting in confinement, unsure of how many more letters he will get to write. In the lines just before Philippians 4:13, he spells out what “all things” means: “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty… In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need” (Phil. 4:12). The “all things” are not unlimited successes; they are the full range of conditions a human life can be thrown into: abundance and scarcity, joy and sorrow, freedom and captivity.
Endurance, for Paul, is not the shiny form of strength that avoids suffering. It is the quieter form that stays when suffering cannot be avoided.
As I listened to my grandmother and her friend, this was the Paul I heard. I heard not the Paul of my childhood, but the Paul whose letters I have come to know as documents of survival. The verse did not sound like a promise of healing. It sounded like a blessing spoken by one sufferer to another, a way of saying, “You are not alone in what you are carrying. You can bear this.”
When the call ended, my grandmother did something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. She turned to me and asked, very simply, “Would you pray for me?”
There are moments when all of your carefully arranged identities fall away. In that instant, I was not an atheist, not a critic of theology, not a commentator on the Pauline corpus. I was just her grandson. The boy she had taken to church, fed at her table, worried over, and bragged about for decades. Saying no was not an option, not because of social pressure, but because of love.
So I reached for the only prayer that could belong fully to both of us: the Lord’s Prayer. We did not negotiate theology. We did not discuss metaphysics. We simply began: “Our Father, who art in heaven…” The words were already there, built into her memory like muscle. We moved through the familiar cadence together, line by line. “Thy kingdom come… Give us this day our daily bread… Forgive us our trespasses…” The petitions that once framed my childhood now framed a hospital bed.
In that moment, prayer was not a claim about how the universe operates. It was a moment of conpassion we could share, a pattern strong enough to hold sorrow without pretending to solve it. It gave her something to lean on, and it gave me something to do with my helplessness. The Lord’s Prayer did what good ritual does at the edge of grief: it gathered scattered emotions into a single, steady voice.
When we finished, she squeezed my hands. We did not need to interpret what had just happened. The connection was the meaning.
In the moments since, I keep returning to Philippians 4:13, not as an argument to be won or a doctrine to be defended, but as a window into the human work of endurance. Paul, writing from prison, insists that he can endure “all things” because he is held by something beyond his own willpower. My grandmother, facing the inevitability of palliative care, hears that verse and feels strength rise in her. I, sitting beside her, feel something similar. I feel it not because I share her theology, but because I share her life.
What I see, when I step back from the creeds and look at the human scene, is that endurance is almost always relational. Paul’s strength is not abstract; it is tied to the people he loves and the communities he refuses to abandon, even when they misunderstand him. He stays present to his churches through letters, prayers, and the sheer persistence of caring who they are becoming. My grandmother’s strength comes from the voices on the other end of those phone calls, from a lifetime of hymns and verses and Sunday School, from the presence of her children and grandchildren in the room. My strength, in turn, comes from her.
Watching her receive that verse—“I can do all things…”—gives me permission to let it work on me, just in a different register. I hear it as a pattern for how to be with her now:
I can sit in this room.
I can hold her hand when she is afraid.
I can help with the small tasks that keep dignity intact: adjusting pillows, fetching water, listening to stories that need to be told one more time.
I can make the difficult calls.
I can stay present through the long, quiet hours that palliative care requires.
In other words, I can endure what love asks of me.
Paul’s letters repeatedly thread these themes together. In Romans, he describes a chain in which “suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Rom. 5:3–4). In 2 Corinthians, he admits that he has been “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair” (2 Cor. 4:8). In 1 Thessalonians, he praises the community’s “steadfastness of hope” (1 Thess. 1:3), a phrase that could just as easily describe the way my grandmother’s generation faces illness: with faith worn in like an old sweater, threadbare in places but still warm.
None of these passages erase pain. They do not spiritualize it away. They name it, and then they insist that there is still something worth holding onto inside it: connection, character, hope. Endurance, in Paul’s vocabulary, is not denial. It is attention and commitment under strain.
In the hospital, I see that same grammar playing out in real time. The doctors talk about probabilities and protocols. The nurses move with practiced efficiency. Family members learn to translate lab numbers into expectations. But beneath the clinical language, the real work is happening in quieter ways: in the way my parents lean toward her when she speaks, in the way she matter-of-factly answers the staff to put them at ease, in the way we all adjust our schedules to make sure someone is always there.
Endurance, at the end of life, is rarely dramatic. It looks like staying. It looks like answering the same fearful question more than once, because memory is fraying and reassurance has to be repeated. It looks like letting someone you love lean on the verses that have carried them no matter how you personally feel.
That is why the moment of prayer with my grandmother matters so much to me. It was not a test of belief. It was a practice of presence. She drew strength from her friend’s reminder that she can “do all things through Christ.” I drew strength from knowing that, whatever tomorrow’s surgery brings, we have already shared something that neither prognosis nor theology can undo: a moment of being fully with each other in the face of what cannot be changed.
If there is a truth in Philippians 4:13 that I can affirm without reservation, it is this: human beings are capable of more endurance than we think when we are bound to one another in love. Paul named that endurance in the language of Christ; my grandmother receives it in the same language. I find it in the simple, ordinary acts of care that fill these days. The verse is not smaller for being read this way. If anything, it becomes more real.
Tomorrow will come, with its risks and its decisions and its outcomes. I do not know what we will be asked to endure next. But tonight, on the eve of surgery, I know this: my grandmother and I have prayed together. We have listened together. We have shared a verse that has carried her for a lifetime and, for a few quiet minutes, carried me as well.
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen