The Unmistakable Freedom of Ben Sasse

What a dying man taught me about what it means to truly live

In December I listened to an interview with Ben Sasse that stopped me in my tracks. And another in February. And another recently. That last one in particular not only challenged me, but ultimately has shifted something deep in me. It’s not hyperbole to say that I think Ben Sasse is currently the most interesting person in the world.

Ben Sasse, the former senator from Nebraska, former president of the University of Florida, a man who by any measure had built the kind of life most people spend their whole careers chasing, sat in the most recent interview across from a New York Times columnist and talked about dying. He has stage four pancreatic cancer. He has five forms of it. Liver, lungs, lymph nodes, vascular system, and the pancreas where it started. He was given three to four months to live.

And he was perhaps the freest man I’ve ever seen.

He wasn’t performing freedom. He wasn’t projecting calm. The interviewer, Ross Douthat, broke down crying during the conversation. And when he did, Sasse laughed. Not unkindly, but the way a man laughs when the heaviness and the lightness of something are both true at the same time and he’s decided not to pretend otherwise.

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since. What would make a man, staring at his own death, more whole than the people around him? What would it take for a terminal diagnosis to produce not despair but a kind of settled, joyful clarity that makes a room full of healthy people weep?

I think the answer is simpler and more terrifying than we want it to be.

Sasse said something in one of his interviews that I can’t stop turning over. He said he was grateful that cancer is “a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.” A man with a death sentence called his disease a gift because it killed something in him that was worse than the cancer. That thing? The idol of self, the illusion that he was in control, the fantasy that he could rely on his own willpower and strength, that his accomplishments mattered the way he thought they did, that the life he’d built was the point.

He talked about how fast everything rearranged. The things he’d cared too much about, the things he’d been too self-reliant about, suddenly seemed, in his words, “pointless.” Career accolades. Political fights. The restless striving that successful men baptize as ambition. All of it burned off like fog in the morning, and what was left underneath was God. Just God.

I know men like this. I am one of those men. I know the striving he’s describing. I live inside it most days. It’s the quiet belief that if I work hard enough, build well enough, perform well enough, I’ll earn something that was never for sale. It’s security and significance. It’s to matter and belong. And then a man like Sasse gets the worst phone call of his life and within weeks is saying things like “this suffering is not salvific, but it’s sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it,” and I have to ask myself what I’m waiting for. What am I clinging to that would have to be pried from my hands before I could see that clearly?

Sasse knew Tim Keller. They talked while Keller was dying of the same cancer. Keller had said something that Sasse admitted sounded strange at first. He said he hated the disease, but he would never want to go back to the prayer life he had before pancreatic cancer. Sasse didn’t understand it then. Now he does.

Two men. Same cancer. Same strange, impossible gratitude. The suffering didn’t create their faith. It incinerated everything that was competing with it. The noise finally stopped, and in the silence they could hear God more clearly than they ever had. I’ve noticed this pattern in my own life on a much smaller scale. The seasons that reshaped me most were never the wins. They were the losses, the failures, the stretches where I had no move left except to pray, mean it, and need it. Suffering has a way of clearing the room. The question is whether there’s anything left when it does.

I think about my own prayer life when I read that, and how often I show up distracted, rushing, and checking a box. Then a dying man tells me he wouldn’t trade the prayers that cancer taught him, and I realize the distance between where I am and where I could be isn’t about effort. It’s about surrender. The very thing I’m most resistant to.

What strikes me most about Sasse is that he refuses to sanitize any of it. He calls death a “wicked thief.” He calls it evil. He won’t dress it up with platitudes or pretend that suffering is beautiful in itself. He grieves it. He told his interviewer that death is “not how things are meant to be.” And yet in the same breath he’ll say that he believes in the resurrection, that he believes there will come a day when there are no more tears, no more cancer, and no more funerals. He holds both truths at the same time and neither one cancels the other.

This is the thing that made Douthat cry. It wasn’t the sadness, but the hope. Sasse was asked if he felt ready to die, and he said he didn’t, but he had hope, because he knew where he was going and who would be there. He called God “father” the way a child would, the way Jesus encouraged us to pray. And something about the simplicity of that, from a man with a Yale PhD and a Senate career and tumors in five organs, broke the interviewer open. It broke me open. I hope it breaks you open.

The Apostle Paul wrote that to live is Christ and to die is gain. I’ve read that verse a hundred times and mostly treated it as a theological statement, something I believed in the abstract. Sasse is living it in the concrete, in real time, in front of cameras, and it’s doing something to everyone who watches. When a man can look at death and say “you’re a thief, but you don’t get the final word,” and you can tell he means it, something shifts. The air changes. You’re not watching a dying man. You’re watching a man who’s more alive than you are, and you know it, and it terrifies you and draws you in at the same time.

One of the things he said that hit me hardest was about the Sabbath. He told his kids he wishes he’d taken the Lord’s Day more seriously, that keeping it was a good antidote to all the temptations and idolatries. Coming from a man who accomplished as much as Sasse did, that’s not a throwaway line. That’s a man at the end of his life saying the weekly rhythm of stopping, resting, remembering you’re not God, was more important than everything he built during the other six days. And, he didn’t do it enough. Even Ben Sasse didn’t do it enough.

I keep coming back to that. If Ben Sasse wishes he’d rested more, worshipped more, slowed down more, what does that say about my calendar and the pace I keep? What does it say about the way I’ve structured my life around productivity and progress and convinced myself it’s faithfulness?

There’s an experimental drug that’s shrunk his tumors by seventy-six percent. He might get more time than the doctors predicted. He’s fighting. He said he felt obligated to fight because his youngest is fourteen and still at home. But the fighting isn’t frantic. It’s the fighting of a man who’s already settled the deeper question. He knows where this ends. He knows it ends well. The fight is for his family, not for himself. There’s a difference.

I don’t know Ben Sasse personally. We’ve followed each other on X (RIP Twitter) through the years and interacted a handful of times. I’ve never sat across a table from him, but I’ve sat across tables from men in crisis and men facing death, and I’ve rarely seen what I see in his interviews. There’s usually a fracture somewhere, a performance, a brave face that slips when you look closely enough. With Sasse, I’ve watched and I can’t see the fracture. He cries and he laughs and he quotes Paul and he calls death a bastard and none of it feels contradictory. It all feels like the same man. He’s the most integrated version of a man I may have ever seen.

That’s what the Gospel does when it takes root and blossoms. It doesn’t make you stoic. It doesn’t make you numb. It makes you the kind of person who can feel everything, the grief and the anger and the hope and the gratitude, all at once, and not be destroyed by any of it. It makes you free. For followers of Jesus, I think most of us are walking around with a Christ we believe in but haven’t fully trusted. We’ve submitted to the theology but held back the surrender. Sasse isn’t holding anything back anymore. And that’s why he looks the way he does. That’s why a dying man without the ability to grow skin on his face can sit in a chair and radiate something the rest of us are starving for.

The question I keep asking myself is why I’m waiting. Why do we wait? Why does it take a diagnosis, a crisis, a detonation, before we let God do the work He’s been wanting to do all along? Sasse said God smashing idols is a blessing. He’s right. That’s the book of Ecclesiastes. That’s what my friend David Gibson calls “living life backward.” But what if we didn’t wait for the sledgehammer? What if we started handing them over now, while we’re healthy, while there’s still time to live in the freedom that’s on the other side?

Sasse’s faith wasn’t born in that hospital room. It was built over decades, in Scripture, in community, in the slow and boring faithfulness of showing up to church and keeping the Sabbath and being known to a few men and praying when he didn’t feel like it. The cancer didn’t give him something new. It revealed what was already there by stripping away everything that wasn’t. This is what I keep telling myself and anyone who will listen. The crisis doesn’t build the foundation. It tests it. And by then it’s too late to pour concrete.

That’s what suffering does when it meets a life built on the right foundation. It doesn’t destroy you. It introduces you to yourself. It shows you what you actually believe, as opposed to what you’ve told yourself you believe. And the distance between those two things, for most of us, is wider than we’d like to admit.

I want to be the kind of man who doesn’t need a death sentence to live free. I want to hold my ambitions more loosely, rest more honestly, pray more desperately, and stop clinging to things that were never going to save me. I want the gap between who I am in public and who I am in private to be so small that if the worst phone call came tomorrow, I’d grieve, but I wouldn’t have to rearrange much. Frankly, I have a long way to go.

Ben Sasse is not teaching us how to die well, but instead, how to truly live. The lesson isn’t complicated. Let go of what doesn’t matter. Hold tightly to what does. Be honest about your weakness. Trust that the God who meets you in your worst moment is the same one who’s been with you all along.

If you’re watching a dying man who’s freer than you are, it begs questions that demand answers. Perhaps in those answers we find life and life abundant.