The Surgeon Who Carried Her Through

In 2011, a three-year-old girl named Elise fell into a frozen pond in rural Minnesota. By the time paramedics pulled her from the water, she had no pulse. Her core temperature had dropped to 60 degrees. By every clinical measure, she was gone.

Dr. Frank Gruber at Hennepin County Medical Center refused to give up. For nearly six hours, his team worked to warm her blood one degree at a time, circulating it outside her body and back in again. He never left the room. When Elise's heart finally flickered back to rhythm, Gruber reportedly wept. He carried her case in his mind for weeks afterward — not with anxiety, but with fierce, protective attention.

That is a faint shadow of what Jude describes in his thundering benediction. The God who keeps you from stumbling is not a passive guardian dozing in a watchtower. He is the surgeon who will not leave the room. He circulates His grace through every frozen moment of your failure, your doubt, your wandering. And the stunning promise of Jude 1:24-25 is not merely that He keeps you alive — but that He presents you blameless, without fault, before His glorious presence with exceeding joy.

Not your joy. His joy. The Almighty does not drag you reluctantly into eternity. He delights to bring you there — whole, blameless, and fully alive.