The Cells That Refuse to Die

In 1972, three researchers — John Kerr, Andrew Wyllie, and Alastair Currie — published a paper that changed how we understand the human body. They described a process called apoptosis: programmed cell death. Every single day, somewhere between fifty and seventy billion cells in your body quietly lay down their lives. They receive a signal, and without resistance, they dismantle themselves from the inside out — so that new, healthy cells can take their place.

This is not a malfunction. It is by design. Your body depends on this daily, invisible sacrifice. Without it, your organs could not develop properly, your immune system could not function, and damaged cells would accumulate unchecked.

And here is what stops me cold every time: the cells that refuse to die — the ones that ignore the signal and cling to their own survival — those are the cells we call cancer.

A cell that insists on its own life at the expense of the body becomes the very thing that destroys it.

Jesus said it plainly: "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds" (John 12:24). The life that clings to itself withers. The life laid down in love multiplies.

The call of the Gospel is not complicated. It is the same call written into every cell of your body: there is a kind of dying that is the only path to life.