On a Walk to Emmaus, Perseverance is the fourteenth talk. By that point in the weekend, pilgrims have heard about grace, piety, study, action, and the Body of Christ. Then comes a simple but hard question: when the weekend is over and life gets difficult, will you keep going?

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot this month.

As many of you know from these articles, 2026 has been quite a year. This summer I lost my grandfather. Then in late October, my grandmother, my dad’s mother, passed away in Texas just a few days short of her 102nd birthday. Doris Sheard Hill Lisenby was my last living grandparent.

Her birthday was Halloween, and that’s the day we gathered to celebrate her life. And it truly was a celebration. It was the most joyful funeral I’ve ever been to.

Over 101 years, she lived through the Great Depression and a pandemic. She buried two husbands, two of her children, and eight brothers and sisters. Yet person after person stood up and said the same thing: “I never heard her complain.”

That wasn’t because life was easy for her, and it wasn’t because everyone around her always did right. Our family is like most families. Some of the people in that room had made choices that cost them dearly, some that cost them years. She never held those things over anyone. She simply loved them, and she made sure every one of them knew they were loved by somebody.

Her pastor shared that when he arrived at her church as a young, nervous preacher, his oldest parishioner was the one who made him feel like family. That was her. Whoever walked in the door, whatever they carried with them, she made room.

Paul wrote that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). I think that’s what perseverance looks like in a life. It isn’t gritting your teeth through hard times. It’s loving your way through them.

I’ll be honest, I’m not always like that. Not many of us are. We all have our grumbles. Years ago, when I was running a company, I tried to handle that with a rule: you could bring me any complaint you wanted, as long as you brought an idea for fixing it. It mostly worked. But my grandmother never needed a rule. She seemed to know that a complaint that doesn’t move us forward is just wasted energy, so she spent hers on people instead.

That’s how I want to be. And when I look around this community, I see some of you already living it. You’re the ones who call when someone has drifted away, who sit with the person nobody else is sitting with, and who love people through their mess instead of keeping score. Thank you. You’re showing the rest of us the way.

At the graveside, on what would have been her 102nd birthday, all of us sang Happy Birthday to my grandmother. It was the most emotional moment of the whole day, and it was exactly the right song. For a woman who loved her way through 101 years, that day wasn’t an ending. It was her first birthday in heaven.

That’s where perseverance leads. Not to a grave, but to a celebration.

De Colores,

Jason Hill