When the Evidence Doesn't Look Like You Expected

In 2010, a young doctor named Paul Kalanithi was finishing his neurosurgery residency at Stanford — years of grueling work nearly behind him, a brilliant career ahead. Then came the diagnosis: stage IV lung cancer at age thirty-six. In his memoir When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi describes the disorientation of a healer suddenly becoming a patient. Everything he thought he knew about how life was supposed to unfold shattered against the reality of a hospital gown and a CT scan.

John the Baptist knew that disorientation. Sitting in Herod's dungeon, the man who had announced the Messiah with fire and certainty now sent a question dripping with honest doubt: "Are you the one, or should we expect someone else?" John had expected axes laid to roots, winnowing forks, and unquenchable fire. Instead, he got a prison cell.

Jesus didn't scold the question. He simply said: Look at what's actually happening. The blind see. The lame walk. The poor hear good news. The evidence was everywhere — it just didn't match John's blueprint.

Kalanithi eventually found meaning not in the cure he never received, but in the work his hands could still do, the words he could still write, the daughter he held before he died.

Sometimes the Almighty answers our deepest doubts not by meeting our expectations, but by pointing us toward something we weren't looking for — and saying, "Blessed is the one who does not stumble on account of me."