The Kidney That Changed Everything

In 2019, Marcus Rivera of San Antonio nearly died waiting for a kidney. When his coworker, a single mother named Dana Wilkins, quietly got tested and turned out to be a match, she gave him one of hers without hesitation. Marcus woke from surgery a different man — not just physically, but in the way he saw his own body. He stopped drinking. He quit smoking after fourteen years. He started walking three miles every morning before sunrise. When friends teased him about his new discipline, Marcus would shake his head. "You don't understand," he told them. "There's a piece of Dana living inside me now. She gave up part of herself so I could keep going. I'm not about to trash what she sacrificed to give me."

Marcus understood something that Paul was driving at in his letter to the Corinthians. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." When someone pays dearly for something — when the cost is flesh and blood and sacrifice — the recipient doesn't treat that gift carelessly. Marcus could have kept drinking. He had the freedom to. But as Paul writes, not everything permissible is beneficial.

Your body is not a rental. It was purchased at an unfathomable cost — the very life of Christ. Every choice you make with it is either an honor or a dismissal of that sacrifice. Like Marcus with Dana's kidney, we carry something sacred within us. The Holy Spirit has taken up residence. How we live in these bodies is our daily answer to the question: Was the price worth paying?