Ben Sauer of Clarence, NY, is four years old. In January, he started having headaches. Today, he is dying of an aggressive form of brain cancer. His mother wrote on her blog, after receiving devastating news last week about her son’s prospects:

Our best option? To take Ben home. Keep him comfortable. Prescribe him a higher dose of the steroid to help manage the pain from the swelling. Try and preserve as much quality of life. Because we’re talking about weeks. That’s it. Not years, not months, not “well, if you manage things pretty well, there’s no doubt he won’t be a healthy adult!”

Weeks.

I’m not entirely sure this news has really set in.

Instead of watching my otherwise healthy four-year-old grow up through the years, I am going to be watching him die over the course of a few weeks.

Dr. Li told us to watch for signs of deterioration. Loss of movement on one or both sides. Slurred speech. Difficulty putting ideas together. Loss of coordination. Seizures. We may be calling Hospice to help assist us with this process. Hospice. The group we called to help with my 97-year-old grandfather last spring. The group we called to help my mother-in-law survive her last few weeks on earth.

Yeah, this information has definitely not settled in yet.

They still can’t believe he hasn’t forfeited any of these physical attributes yet. He is so high functioning. He follows their finger with his eyes, has had no loss of coordination, has great muscle control and his speech is just as powerful as it ever was. If it weren’t for his headaches, we would have never even looked for anything that even resembled a tumor. It’s as if the kid you see in the MRI scan is not the same as the one in the hospital bed.

And yet… God.

The stage is definitely set for God to do a miracle. If Ben is healed from this most aggressive of the aggressive tumors, everyone will know that it was the Lord. There would be no other logical explanation. Medicine has carried pretty much as far as it can. He is definitely capable. And yet He is sovereign. He is not obligated to do anything. He owes us nothing.

You have no idea how difficult this is for me to say.

The Sauer family is not walking alone. The reader who sent me this said the entire city of Buffalo and the surrounding area, where the Sauers live, has come together to pray for Ben and to support the family. Ben’s mother, Mindy, writes about the outpouring of love here.

This matters. Believe me, it matters. Bright sadness, all of it. Do what you can for Big Ben.