The wit and confidence are, like his diagnosis, incurable.

"Stage 4? I never felt a thing, except in those last few weeks," evangelist Luis Palau says. "Where's one, two and three?"

He concedes the tears. "I've never cried so much ... crying not with horror but with sadness," Palau said Tuesday. "I can't pick up the phone and call the boys and ask how they're doing? That put a chill up my spine. And my wife ...?"

But when you've preached the Gospel for 64 years, and in 80 some countries, you know the good news arrives with an unsettling promise or two:

"When I woke up yesterday morning, one of the thoughts the Lord said to me is, 'I thought you read the Bible, and you knew there comes a time when it's time to go.'"

Palau has Stage 4 lung cancer. That time is nigh. He is 83 and he will not preach into his 90s, which was always the plan. With chemotherapy, he may only have another year.

A year to proclaim the relief of trusting God. Another year to live that out.

Death had a formative role in Palau's early evangelism. He was 10 when his father contracted pneumonia in Ingeniero Maschwitz, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

It was 1944, and there was little or no penicillin in Argentina. Luis Palau was at a British boarding school, and he could not return home in time. But what transfixed and transformed him was the story of how his father spent his final minutes.

Not like a neighbor who died the previous summer. "The Latins are more expressive than the Anglos, you know," Palau says, "and this guy, we could hear him screaming from 30 yards down the road: 'I'm dying! I'm dying! I'm going to hell and no one can save me.'"

His father had a different conviction. He sat up in bed to sing an old Salvation Army song, then promised everyone he was destined for a better place before collapsing on his pillow.

"Right then and there," Palau says, "I thought I'm going to tell people how to die and go to heaven, not screaming like my neighbor, lost and hopeless."

People in Singapore and Seville. Neighbors in Nicaragua, China and the Soviet Union.

If Dr. Regan Duffy, Palau's upbeat oncologist at Providence St. Vincent, has anything to say about it, maybe even festival-goers in Bogota, Colombia, and Grand Rapids, Wisc., in the coming year.

You have to marvel at the man's endless sense of mission, says Kevin Palau, one of his four sons: "At the journey of a kid from, literally, a cow town in Argentina, whose father dies when he is 10, who has no money and no connections, who thought God was calling him to be an evangelist like Billy Graham.

"He had no earthly reason to think it could happen. But he had a calm sense of faith that if this is what God is calling me to do, he'll open the door for me to do it."

In this day and age, Palau's message remains refreshingly apolitical. "My whole life," Palau says, "has been dedicated to this subject: Go to heaven. Don't be stupid. God wants everyone to be saved. That's why he went to the cross."

And the Luis Palau Association, based in Beaverton, has a rich history in the launch of local initiatives like CityServe, Embrace Oregon and the Refuge Care Collective.

Andrew Palau - who was born in Colombia, married a woman from Jamaica and has adopted a child from Ethiopia - often shares the festival stage with his father. He promises the work will continue, home and abroad.

"You can't live in fear," Andrew Palau says. "One thing he's always taught us: You are just a humble servant. You're just a piece of it. Play out your role. Why wouldn't you believe the best is yet to come?"

You can't sugarcoat some of what is to come. "You fear the human side," Palau says. "The idea of a body broken. People needing to take care of you.

"The Bible says the last enemy to be defeated is death. You rake through your past and your soul and think, 'Is there anything I need to settle? Am I forgiven? Am I really clean before the Lord?'"

When you finally set the rake aside, you're blessed if you conclude, as Palau has, "Yep. From all I read in the documents, I'm forgiven."

Thus, when the time comes, he'll sing with his father, not the forlorn neighbor down the road. He'll meet that last mortal enemy with an assurance to die for.

"I'll live the last few days thanking God for 83 years," Palau says. "I'm loved by too many people."

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com