Daily Verse
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Stewardship
🎧 Listen to Today's Devotional
Wednesday's Reflection
1 Corinthians 15:58 — Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.
Cicely Saunders spent her life learning how to care for people the rest of the world did not know how to help — the dying. She began as a nurse, but a back injury ended that path. So she retrained as a medical social worker. Then, realizing she could do more, and encouraged by a doctor who told her the field needed her, she went to medical school and qualified as a physician in her late thirties — starting over, yet again, to gain the skill her calling required. She was driven by a deep Christian faith and by what she had seen at the bedsides of the dying: people in pain, often abandoned, treated as hopeless cases simply because they could not be cured.
Saunders refused to accept that the dying were beyond help just because they were beyond cure. She poured the rest of her life into a new idea — that the last stage of life deserved skilled, compassionate care that treated the whole person: body, mind, and spirit. In 1967 she founded St. Christopher's Hospice in London, and from that one place the modern hospice movement spread across the world, transforming how millions of people now spend their final days — with their pain managed, their dignity honored, and their humanity seen. She had stewarded her gifts and her years with extraordinary intention, retraining three times over because the work mattered more than her comfort or her résumé.
Paul's encouragement fits her life exactly: be steadfast, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because your labor is not in vain. Cicely Saunders could have settled into any number of easier careers. Instead she spent her one life on a hard, unglamorous, deeply needed work, and the fruit of it now reaches people she will never meet. That is stewardship of a whole life — not just a gift offered once, but a lifetime poured deliberately into something that serves others and honors God. Her labor was not in vain, and ours is not either, when we spend it on what matters to God.
Prayer: Lord, give us Cicely Saunders' willingness to spend our lives on what truly matters to You, even when it is hard and costly. Help us to steward not just a single gift but our whole lives, abounding in Your work, knowing our labor is never in vain. Amen.