What Remains When Nothing Can Be Done

Lent and the Grace of Uselessness

by Kyle Wells

We’re grateful to share this reflection from Pastor Kyle Wells on the mystery of human worth and the grace of love that does not depend on usefulness or outcome. As we journey through the season of Lent, may these words help us turn again toward the Lord, who meets us not in our strength or productivity, but in our need—and who holds every life in his mercy.

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“Do you ever picture the face of the child you lost?”

He asked in the middle of a bar, over half-finished drinks. I didn’t expect the question. By the time an answer formed, I was already crying — too much to say it aloud.

We were there because a couple weeks earlier, he and his wife had learned that their unborn child had anencephaly, a condition in which a baby develops without most of the brain and skull.

Our family shared a special relationship with this couple. The wife once rented a room in our home and became part of our life. I officiated their wedding. Our daughter was the flower girl. I baptized their first two children.

I will bury their third.

Anencephaly is rare — about one in 4,600 pregnancies in the United States. It is not the kind of diagnosis most churches ever encounter. And yet, six years earlier, another couple in our relatively small congregation received the same terrible news.

There is no medical path forward with anencephaly. You are given time and nothing else. Time to carry a child who will not live. Time to explain to siblings. Time to wait for a birth that will also be a death.

Sitting in the bar, I watched him struggle to say what could not quite be said. Beneath the grief and confusion was a question that would haunt any parent in his position: Does my son’s life matter? Does a life that cannot be fixed, extended, or made productive still mean something?

Here was a father fighting to love his child without knowing how to defend that love — to himself or to anyone else.

I measure worth by capacity and outcome more quickly than I want to admit. A life matters if it can grow, choose, achieve, become. When those markers disappear, I feel unmoored — not only because of the pain but because something more basic about us is laid bare. An anencephalic child confronts us, painfully and without asking permission, with the possibility that value might not rest on what a life can do at all, exposing how deeply we measure meaning by usefulness, love by contribution, and worth tied to whatever future a life can promise.

Each year on Ash Wednesday, the church dares to say out loud what is usually kept at bay. We are marked with ashes and told the words we spend most of the year avoiding: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Not someday but already. Lent invites us to stand still long enough to feel our creatureliness: to admit how little we control and how near death always is. Understood rightly, Lent strips away our favorite defenses — progress, productivity, spiritual usefulness — and leaves us standing with nothing but our bodies, our limits, and our need.

And so the question remains.

Does this life matter?

Every week brings the parents closer to a birth that will also be a goodbye. There is no project to complete, no story that moves toward resolution.

For now, the question is met the only way it can be: by carrying a child who cannot explain his worth … and loving him anyway.

As I have lived with this situation, I have found myself returning, again and again, to the mother of Jesus. Mary carries a child she did not choose, at real bodily cost, without any clear picture of what lies ahead. She is not given a future she can manage, only a promise she cannot yet understand and the knowledge that it will pierce her (Lk 2:35). Her faith is expressed in bearing what has been entrusted to her, day after day, without answers.

That, too, is a form of witness: the costly, quiet refusal to turn away from a life given, even when that life will not resolve the questions it raises.

So it is with this couple. Without any hope of clarity or closure, they carry a child whose output will not justify the cost of love. And yet they carry him anyway, because love does not wait for an ending to begin.

The Sunday after I heard the news, I found myself across from this couple at the Lord’s Table. In our church, we come forward and gather in small circles to receive the bread and wine. That morning I wasn’t serving. I was standing opposite her, waiting to be served. As I looked at her, the familiar words rose in my mind, the ones I have said so many times they almost feel automatic:

The body of Christ, given for you. And for your household.

But standing there, hands wide open, looking at a mother whose body was visibly carrying a child who would not live, gave the words new significance.

This was how Christ loves. This is how Christ loves me.

Not by looking for my potential. Or waiting for me to be useful.

No.

Christ gives his body to those who have nothing to offer in return. He gives himself to the exposed, the dependent, the unfinished.

In that moment, the agonizing question — Does this life matter? — no longer felt like the deepest one. Beneath it was another question altogether: What kind of love meets us here?

And the answer was not an explanation, but a gift.

They named their son Alexander, meaning protector of mankind.

It is a startling name. At first, it almost sounded cruel. This child would not protect anyone in the ways we usually mean. And yet, over time, I began to see how fitting the name was.

This child is protecting us — not from suffering but from the assumption that meaning must be earned, that a life must justify itself, that worth is secured by capacity, outcome, or endurance.

Alexander’s life stands in the way of that assumption. Simply by being carried, by being loved. Simply by refusing to make sense on our terms.

For me, his life has become a witness against a temptation I cannot seem to shake: to believe value is achieved rather than received, proven rather than given. His very existence exposes how quickly I want a life to justify itself.

The season of Lent leads the church back to the cross, where we cannot pretend our lives are secured by strength or usefulness. The path Lent traces is not a training regimen for spiritual growth. It is a slow undoing. We walk with Jesus toward the cross not to learn endurance but to be relieved of the burden of proving that our lives — and the lives of those we love — are worth something. The cross is not where suffering is explained. It is where the demand for explanation finally collapses.

And what remains? The God whose love justifies a life without regard to any worth.

Christ does not redeem human life by making it impressive. He redeems it by joining it at its most exposed. And in doing so, he answers a question we cannot answer for ourselves: A life matters not because of what it can do, become, or survive — but because it is held, named, and loved by God.

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This article was originally published by Mockingbird.

Kyle hails from Memphis, TN—the birthplace of Rock and Roll, home of the Blues, where Elvis is King, Jesus is Lord, and Barbecue is spicy. This upbringing has deeply influenced this love of food, music, and Jesus. He is author of Grace and Agency in Paul and Second Temple Judaism (Brill, 2015), for which he was awarded the 2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. His most shining accomplishment, however, is getting his wife Pam to say “yes”. They have one daughter, Niamh (pronounced Neeve), whose looks and personality bear an uncanny resemblance to her father, which makes him as scared as it does proud.