01 May The Worst Thing Isn’t the Last Thing
We were seated near the front of the church, in the second row. It was Easter morning, and the sanctuary was packed—people shoulder to shoulder in floral prints and pastels. Children clutched plastic eggs in sticky hands, some wearing sparkly bunny ears that wobbled when they turned their heads.
In the front row just ahead of us, a girl—maybe fourteen or fifteen—sat in a wheelchair pulled up beside the pew, right at the end of the aisle. She was completely focused, her eyes fixed on the pulpit. Every so often, she murmured something under her breath, barely audible, nodding along.
As the sermon moved toward its close, the minister paused and said, “Easter reminds us that even when things seem at their worst, that’s never the end of the story.” He let the words settle for a moment, then added, “As Frederick Buechner once wrote, ‘The worst thing is never the last thing.’”
The girl’s face lit up. She looked up and called out, clear and bright: “No cap! No cap!”
There was a pause—sharp and immediate. People turned. The room seemed to stiffen, unsure how to respond.
The girl’s caregiver leaned in quickly, whispering something to her. The woman looked flustered—maybe startled by the volume, or by the visibility of sitting so close to the front. Not angry. Just unsure. Uncomfortable with the attention.
And the girl’s smile faltered. Her gaze dropped. Her shoulders curled inward just slightly—as if she’d done something wrong. As if she’d made the worst kind of mistake.
I’d heard teenagers say no cap before—as a way of agreeing wholeheartedly, like saying “for real” or “yes, that’s it.” But the woman sitting beside me—probably in her seventies—didn’t seem to know or care what the phrase meant.
She didn’t stop to wonder if she understood it.
She just knew the girl loved what she heard. And that was enough.
Without hesitation, she leaned forward, joy in her voice, and echoed the girl’s words: “No cap! No cap!”
The person next to her chimed in, louder: “No cap! No cap!”
The girl turned toward the sound, looked back—and her whole face lit up again. Her shoulders dropped. Her body softened. That smile came back, wide and easy.
The woman beside me reached out, tapped her arm warmly, and said, “I’m so glad you said that. I love that quote, too.”
I keep thinking about how close that moment came to ending in silence, in awkwardness, in retreat. A moment that could have left her feeling exposed, small, wrong.
But then it didn’t.
Because in that moment, someone decided the worst thing didn’t have to be the last thing.