Her name was Becka.
She was a slight woman — the kind whose physical presence you could underestimate right up until she walked into a room and you couldn't look anywhere else. She had a way of showing up that made the air feel different. She made you laugh when you didn't see it coming. She had things to say worth hearing. She knew things. She shared them freely.
She made you feel more alive just by being around her.
I sat with her recently. The oxygen. The medication. Eyes mostly closed. The woman who could light up a room reduced to this — a bed, a battle, a body doing everything it could just to hold on a little longer. It was one of the hardest things I've sat with in a long time.
I walked out sad and at peace at the same time.
I couldn't have told you where the peace came from. I still can't fully explain it. I didn't summon it. I'm not capable of summoning that kind of peace. It showed up because I showed up — and that's the most honest way I know to say it.
I didn't know Becka for decades. Just a handful of years. We met through our small group at Grace Community Church — the kind of setting where you show up week after week and somewhere along the way people stop being acquaintances and start being people you'd do anything for.
That's what happened with Becka.
She ran a family tour business — took kids to Gettysburg, to Washington DC, to the places where the country's story happened. She didn't drive the bus. She understood what she was doing. She was putting young people in front of something bigger than themselves and trusting it would matter. It did. That's not a small thing, even if she probably didn't think of it in those terms.
She loved her husband, Dan. She loved her family. She loved kids — not as a category, as actual human beings worth her full attention.
And she believed. Deeply, seriously, with her whole self. She also worried — about Revelation, about heaven, about whether she'd gotten it right, about whether what she believed was enough. She held both of those things simultaneously for as long as I knew her. The strong faith and the honest doubt, living right next to each other.
I prayed for a miracle.
A lot of us did. We prayed with faith and we prayed with urgency and we meant every word of it. I kept praying until the end. I'll be honest with you — when it didn't come the way we asked, something in me felt the shake. Not a collapse. Not a crisis. Just the honest tremor that happens when you believe God can do something and He does it differently than you asked.
I don't have a tidy answer for that. I'm not going to pretend I do.
At some point that night someone asked me to pray. I had nothing prepared. Nothing rehearsed. What came out was just the truth — that we all wanted something different. That we had asked for something different. But that God wanted her. And somehow saying that out loud, unrehearsed and unpolished, was the most honest prayer I've prayed in a long time.
Something met me in that room that I could not have manufactured on my own. I showed up. It showed up. That's the peace that passes understanding — not the absence of sadness, not the absence of the shake, but something that holds you while you're in both simultaneously.
I walked out sad and at peace at the same time.
I still can't fully explain it. I've stopped needing to.
Here's what I know about Becka.
If she could hear everything I just wrote — the room, the prayer, what she meant to the people who loved her — she would have stopped me cold.
That was her. That was exactly her.
She spent her whole life wondering if she'd gotten it right. If her faith was enough. If she measured up to the standard she held herself to so seriously. She worried about Revelation. She worried about heaven. She worried about what she would say, what she would do, when she knelt at the feet of Jesus for the first time upon arrival.
I love that about her. She was so serious about getting it right that she worried about getting that right too. Most people don't think that far. Becka thought all the way to the moment.
Here's what I think happened.
I think she got there and every word she'd been trying to find — every rehearsed phrase, every worried preparation — all of it disappeared. Because when you're finally fully known, finally fully seen, finally standing in the presence of the one who made you and loved you before you had a single doubt about any of it —
You don't need words.
He had her. He'd had her the whole time she was worried He didn't.
That was the part she couldn't see. Everybody around her could. Not that she'd earned anything — Becka would have been the first person to tell you she hadn't. Just that she was already held, and it showed on her, week after week, in a room full of people who loved her for it.
She knows that now. All of it. Fully. Finally.
She can stop worrying.
She knows fully now.
Rest well, Becka.