The Kidney Recipient's Promise

In 2019, a thirty-two-year-old man named Derek Mitchell from Memphis received a kidney from a twenty-four-year-old woman who had died in a car accident. Before the transplant, Derek had spent years ignoring his health — fast food at every meal, heavy drinking on weekends, skipping every follow-up appointment his doctors scheduled. His body was his to wreck, or so he figured.

But something shifted the morning a nurse handed him a letter from the donor's mother. She wrote, "My daughter Sarah loved to run half-marathons. She took care of herself because she believed her body was a gift. Now part of her lives in you."

Derek wept. He could not bring himself to pour another drink. He started walking, then jogging, then cooking meals that would protect the organ a grieving mother had entrusted to him. "This kidney isn't mine," he told a reporter. "Someone paid for my second chance with everything she had. I owe it to Sarah to live like it matters."

Paul's words to the Corinthians carry that same weight. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." The Most High did not simply repair us — He moved in. Our bodies became the dwelling place of His Spirit, purchased not with silver but with the blood of Christ. When we grasp the cost, the way we treat this temple changes forever.