The Lung Transplant on the Fourth Floor

In 2019, a thirty-one-year-old teacher named Marcus Reed received a double lung transplant at Duke University Hospital. The donor was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who had died in a car accident outside Raleigh. Marcus spent eleven weeks recovering, learning to breathe again with lungs that once belonged to someone else.

His pulmonologist, Dr. Amita Patel, told him something he never forgot: "These lungs are a gift. Every breath you take from now on was made possible by someone else's sacrifice. You don't get to treat them carelessly."

Marcus had smoked before his diagnosis. He had lived hard, eaten poorly, stayed up too late. But after the transplant, everything shifted. He started walking three miles every morning. He changed what he put into his body. Not out of guilt — out of gratitude. "These lungs aren't really mine," he told his students. "Someone died so I could breathe. I owe it to that kid to take care of what he gave me."

Paul's words to the Corinthians carry that same weight. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." The price was not a surgical procedure — it was the blood of Christ. Every part of us, body and soul, was reclaimed at an unimaginable cost. When we honor God with our bodies, we are not earning anything. We are simply breathing with the lungs Someone else gave us, and refusing to waste a single breath.