Day: December 21, 2025
A caregiver’s Christmas
A Christmas or two ago, we arrived in Denver just after Thanksgiving for my wife’s long-awaited surgery — one of a series of complex procedures that could only be done at the teaching hospital there. The hospital was already dressed for the season, garlands hung and trees lit, but I barely noticed. All I could see was the next hurdle in a long medical journey.
After eight days in the ICU, Gracie was transferred to the neuro floor. I wanted her to feel something of Christmas, so I slipped out to a store and returned with a small tree, poinsettias, battery candles for the window, and stockings I hung by the nurses’ message board. A friend loaned me a keyboard, which I tucked into the corner. Music has steadied us through many storms, and I hoped it would do so again.
Christmas felt sharper there. Simpler. More honest. When life strips away what doesn’t matter, what does matter finally comes into view.
When the nurses wheeled her into that room, she entered a tiny Christmas world carved out of tile and fluorescent light. The cinnamon-scented broom was no match for the Montana pines behind our home, but it still brought a smile.
Gracie sometimes sang from her hospital bed as I played familiar carols. You’ll be relieved to know that when a staffer requested Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” I politely declined and stayed with the classics. Her song gets ample airplay as it is.
Learning the language of hospital life
I have been a caregiver for a long time. We have spent nearly every major holiday in a hospital, along with most minor ones — birthdays, anniversaries, and the days in between.
Hospitals, however harsh, have become familiar enough that they no longer disorient me. In the last three years alone, we spent nearly 11 months in that same Denver hospital over three difficult stretches. Over the decades, Gracie has been inpatient in 13 different hospitals. After that many years, you learn the rhythms, the noises, the hush, and the hidden grief of those hallways.
At night, before crossing the street to the extended-stay hotel where I lived during that long stretch, I often stopped at the grand piano in the massive lobby and played Christmas hymns. Patients and their families drifted nearby or stood quietly along the balcony with IV poles and wheelchairs. Their faces carried the loneliness, fear, and disbelief that appear when life tilts without warning. When I played “Silent Night,” you could see the change. Shoulders dropped. Eyes softened. A few wiped away tears.
We lived in Nashville for 35 years before moving to Montana, and the only time I felt a lump in my throat at that piano was when I played “Tennessee Christmas.” When I reached the line about Denver snow falling, it hit me harder than I expected. Being far from home — and yet exactly where we needed to be — settled heavily on me in that moment.
Spending Christmas Eve in a hospital is unlike any other day. For a few minutes that night, the music gave all of us a place to breathe. While I’ve grown somewhat used to that world, I could tell my impromptu audience had not. So I played for them.
Not home, but holy
Our youngest son flew in, and a close friend joined us for Christmas Eve. In that small room upstairs, we shared meals, prayed, and laughed through the kind of tears that form when joy and exhaustion sit side by side. It was not home, but it was holy.
On Christmas morning, we filled stockings, opened gifts, and played more music. To our surprise, that hospital Christmas became one of the most meaningful we’ve ever known. We have enjoyed plenty of postcard holidays in the Montana Rockies, with snowy woods and trees cut from behind our cabin. Yet none of those scenes compared to the quiet radiance of that hospital room.
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Christmas felt sharper there. Simpler. More honest. When life strips away what doesn’t matter, what does matter finally comes into view.
God stepped into a harsh world, not a perfect one. The first Christmas came in conditions far cruder than ours, yet Heaven filled that stable. That is the story we remember every year: Emmanuel — God with us.
I thought of that as I looked up from the piano in the lobby, seeing the sadness on the faces around me and those watching from above. It brought to mind the crowds Jesus saw when Scripture says He was “moved with compassion” for the afflicted. Unlike me, He did not merely observe sorrow. He stepped into it. He came to bear it, redeem it, and ultimately remove it.
The light that still shines
That night reminded me that the holiness of Christmas is not found in perfect scenes but in God drawing near to people who are hurting. Being in a hospital on Christmas Eve was a fitting picture of how needy we truly are — and how miraculous it is that Christ entered our sorrow, suffering, and loneliness. Emmanuel means God with us, not in theory, but in the raw places where we feel most alone.
I left Denver with a truth I needed to keep close: Joy does not depend on scenery. Any place can become a sanctuary when Christ is worshipped — even a hospital room where monitors beep and nurses whisper through the night.
If you’re facing a season you never would have chosen, may this Christmas meet you with that same comfort. The promise of Emmanuel — God with us — has not changed.
“Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light; the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” Phillips Brooks wrote in 1868, steadying his people with the truth that Christ walks into dark streets as readily as bright ones.
Fact check: No — Jesus was not a refugee
There’s a narrative that circulates in progressive “Christian” circles every time Christmas rolls around: Jesus was born a refugee.
Not only does this take the focus from Jesus’ ultimate identity — the Son of God and savior of mankind — and channels it toward a destructive political agenda, but it’s also just false. Jesus was not a refugee by today’s standards.
On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey debunks this ridiculous argument that uses toxic empathy to push open borders.
“We can have a separate biblical defense of defending refugees and how many refugees we should accept and which refugees we should accept from what countries. That’s fine,” says Allie, “but the argument should not be based in the idea that Jesus Himself was a refugee. He was not a refugee in the same sense that we are defining refugees today.”
A refugee in the modern sense, she explains, is “someone who is leaving one country and going to another country to take refuge.”
But that doesn’t describe Mary and Joseph at all. They were simply obeying a Roman census decree that required them to travel inside the empire they already belonged to. This was an internal journey within the same province, not an international border-crossing or asylum-seeking flight comparable to modern refugees entering the United States.
Then after Jesus was born and Herod ordered the massacre of all boys under 2 in Bethlehem, the family — acting on an explicit divine command from God — fled to Egypt, which was also a Roman province at the time.
Mary and Joseph’s travels were never “a breaking of the law,” says Allie.
She reads from Matthew 2:13-15: “Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child and destroy him.’ And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.”’
It’s a “completely different scenario” than progressive “Christians” would like us to believe. Jesus’ family’s flight to Egypt was prophecy fulfillment, obedience to the Lord, and deliverance from a murderous tyrant. And it all happened “within the same empire,” meaning no laws were broken, Allie counters.
The progressive “Christian” argument that anyone who doesn’t support refugees — which today means anyone “who wants to come here from a poorer country” — is somehow against Jesus because He was a refugee is just pure manipulation, she says. It employs “toxic empathy” to get well-intentioned Christians to denounce “enforcement of sovereignty and borders,” both of which are biblical.
“You understand that God created laws and governments and borders and sovereignty for our good, for our protection?” Allie asks.
But there’s another part of the Christmas story progressives conveniently forget: Jesus and His family went home. After Herod died, God told Joseph to “take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel” (Matthew 2:20), but because Herod’s son, another brutal tyrant, was on the throne, they returned to Nazareth, where it all began.
That’s the opposite story of the modern refugee experience, where people often never return home because they can’t or just won’t.
What progressive “Christians” are doing, Allie explains, is reading the Christmas story through a modern, politicized lens. Their version is not only historically inaccurate, it exchanges the “good news of great joy” for a manipulative political strategy that cons people into supporting open borders.
They’re “not getting more into the heart of Jesus and more into the reason for Christmas,” she says. “[They] are instead trying to extract meaning out of the Christmas story in order to accomplish [their] political ends, and in so doing, are very distracted from what it really means.”
To hear more of Allie’s argument, watch the episode above.
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Jelly Roll receives second chance, thanks to Tennessee governor’s Christmas season tradition
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) maintains an annual Christmas season tradition of granting clemency to select individuals, highlighting stories of redemption and second chances.
This year, Lee extended pardons to 33 individuals. The most notable beneficiary was country music star Jelly Roll, who was previously convicted of robbery and drug felonies.
‘His story is remarkable, and it’s a redemptive, powerful story, which is what you look for and what you hope for.’
“I am genuinely inspired by the broadness of the folks that are getting pardons today,” Lee said, the Tennessean reported.
The governor called his pardon power “a very serious responsibility.”
While federal pardons allow convicted individuals to avoid prison time, Tennessee pardons serve as a statement of forgiveness after time has been served. The AP reported that they offer a path to restoring certain civil rights, including voting rights. The governor may specify the terms of the pardon.
Jelly Roll, whose given name is Jason DeFord, stated during a January 2024 congressional hearing that his right to vote had been restricted due to his criminal past.
Jelly Roll. Photo by Georgiana Dallas/WWE via Getty Images
As part of the clemency process, applications undergo a months-long review, the Associated Press reported. The state parole board reportedly issued a unanimous, non-binding recommendation for Jelly Roll in April.
The music artist visited the governor’s mansion on Thursday to receive the news.
“His story is remarkable, and it’s a redemptive, powerful story, which is what you look for and what you hope for,” Lee stated.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Jelly Roll stated that the clemency would make it easier for him to travel internationally for his concert tours and Christian missionary work.
Earlier this month, while appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jelly Roll received word that he had been invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
“I didn’t even dream of it,” Jelly Roll told Rogan. “God will make things bigger than your dreams. Somebody out there right now is dreaming of something, and it’s too small. Dream bigger, baby.”
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