“That was much too kind,” Sasse added. “Thank you for the words.”
In answer to Pratt’s question, Sasse alluded to something else Pratt had said earlier, “that you want to live a life of gratitude because of all that God has done for you,” said Sasse. “You want to get right what your dad got right. You want your boys to want to get that right. And you want to get right what your dad got wrong.”
“Really,” said Sasse, “you said, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength,’ and amen.”
Sasse said that he is just under 100 days since he was told he had three to four months to live, “and I’m doing a heck of a lot better now than I was at Christmas when I was diagnosed. So I got, you know, a few extra months to serve.”
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“Why we went forward with this podcast and with a few other things is we’re always always on the clock. We’re all always on the clock, right?” said Sasse. “We’re all on our deathbeds.”
Earlier in the discussion, Pratt had described his line of work as one “where we create idols and we worship them.”
Calling those words “so real,” Sasse said, “We’re meant as dependent creatures to live lives of gratitude to God and to co-create and to build and to cherish creation, but to ultimately pray, ‘Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,’ and then tomorrow to do it again.”
“The idea that we’re ever going to build a storehouse that’s going to last is a pretty stupid misunderstanding of who we are,” said Sasse. “We’re little kids who get to look at God and call him ‘Abba,’ ‘father,’ ‘daddy.’ And he provides, and we get to live it again today and try again tomorrow.”
“It feels to me like there’s a pretty great opportunity to love your neighbor when you only have a limited time left because you get to say something true that’s always true about all of us,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get too philosophical.”
Pratt said he appreciated Sasse’s thoughts and asked, “So you’d say the hope you have is in God and is in getting right with God and praying…you know, praying the way God tells us to pray then?”
“To whom else would I go?” Sasse asked. “You have the words of eternal life.”
“And then you get to do a whole bunch…of secular important tasks like build really good roads,” he said, “and do stuff that cherishes and maintains a framework for ordered liberty and makes people laugh and sets up really good food service where people can gather around a table and break bread together and cherish all the good stuff that comes from creation.”
Pratt was curious if Sasse believed “there’s more brokenness now in the world than before,” commenting, “I wonder if that’s just the result of us having more windows into the reality around us.”
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