Category: Caregiving
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.
RELATED: What we lose when we rush past pain
nathamag11 via iStock/Getty Images
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.
My crooked house made me rethink what really needs fixing
Our new addition is finally finished — level floors, wide doors, and a space where my wife, Gracie, can move freely despite her severe disabilities. After years of improvising in tight quarters, we’re grateful to have a place that works for us, even if it’s not perfect.
The new part of the house went up during Trump’s second non-consecutive term; the original part went up during the second term of the only other president to do the same, Grover Cleveland. Joining the two is a bit like welding a Tesla to a horse-drawn buggy — functional, charming, and only slightly defiant of gravity.
When most of life leans, you can still make one crooked thing right.
During construction, the fridge in our tiny kitchen got bumped off the carefully placed shims and tilted just enough to drive me crazy. Admittedly, that’s not a long trip.
I ignored it for about a week but finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Leveling a refrigerator in a cabin built during the Cleveland administration isn’t simple. There are pulleys, levers, questions about physics, and — in my case — a call to the engineering department at Montana State. They were not amused. My neighbor Charles, who often “pity helps” me, wasn’t available. I can’t prove it, but I think he hung up and immediately burst into laughter.
So I did it myself.
I knew it would be a project — and once I started, it could not easily be interrupted by caregiving duties. But exasperation collided with need, and I got down on the floor (at a slant) and went to work. It went exactly as expected: mild swearing, a few tears, and then a small victory. When the bubble on the level finally drifted near the center, I declared success, remembering that old rancher’s saying: “Most things can be fixed with baling wire and bad language.”
It’s level — well, Montana level — but I’ll take it.
Much of what I’ve faced as a caregiver over 40 years can’t be fixed. But small victories, like leveling a refrigerator in a house built when bread was 3 cents and buffalo still outnumbered politicians, remind me that even when most of life leans, you can still make one crooked thing right.
Everyone has a version of that tilted refrigerator — something off-kilter you keep meaning to fix but never quite reach. It might be a strained relationship, a stack of bills, or a heart worn down by too much bad news. You can’t straighten the world, but you can steady what’s right in front of you.
When life feels unsettled, taking time to level something — even a small thing — matters more than we think. Sometimes that quiet act of setting one thing right gives us just enough footing to stand through the rest of it.
RELATED: When fathers fall, grace asks more of us
Osobystist via iStock/Getty Images
Years ago, city officials talked about “broken-window” policing: Neglect one thing, and the whole neighborhood starts to crumble. The opposite is also true. Fix one small thing, and a bit of order comes back. Leveling even one ordinary object pushes back against the chaos.
Most caregiving must be repeated tomorrow, but every so often something stays fixed. A grab bar anchored in the right place. A ramp that finally fits the chair. The day may still be full of mess and pain, but that one thing won’t need doing again. It stands there quietly, reminding you that not everything leans. Some things still hold. And sometimes that’s enough to remind you that you still can too.
When I turn on the news, I see dysfunction I can’t do anything about. But when I fix dinner, my refrigerator no longer leans.
There’s an old Appalachian saying: “Fix what you can. The rest was never yours to mend.”
Level what you can. Let the rest lean.
What we lose when we rush past pain
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” wrote C.S. Lewis in “A Grief Observed” after the death of his wife. Grief often strips away our certainties, leaving us to fear if God is who we thought He was, or if our suffering has any meaning at all. In allowing grief to become his teacher, Lewis left a road map for others, showing how to sit with sorrow, process it, and respect both loss and trauma.
That understanding doesn’t come casually; it takes time. In that willingness to observe pain rather than manage it lies a quiet reverence, a recognition that some experiences are not meant to be conquered but understood.
Suffering doesn’t exist to make us louder or more righteous. It exists to make us wiser — to teach maturity, not mobilize outrage.
I watched a young widow step into public life just weeks after her husband’s death. The world called her strong — and maybe she is — but what I saw most was sorrow: raw, recent, and surrounded by noise.
We rush to praise courage yet hesitate to sit with grief. Pain now unfolds before an audience eager to watch and quicker still to turn sorrow into argument. The question isn’t whether we’ll look, but how. Will we meet grief with reverence or rhetoric?
Suffering doesn’t exist to make us louder or more righteous. It exists to make us wiser — to teach maturity, not mobilize outrage.
When nations grieve
What’s true for one heart is true for a nation. After 9/11, America was ready to fight — and we did. But what did we learn? How did we grow? What did we lose along the way? Pain can rally a nation, yet fail to mature its people. Did we take enough time to observe our national trauma?
The lives lost, the wounded carried home, and the enormous resources spent all suggest we did not. And what is true of nations is true of hearts: When we rush past pain, we forfeit the wisdom it offers.
The thought that God rules our pain can make us flinch. If God doesn’t rule it, suffering has no purpose — something to endure but not to transform. His sovereignty may not always appear kind, yet as William Cowper reminded us, “Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.”
In four decades as a caregiver, I’ve learned that trauma has its own language, one that will not be hurried or managed. It needs presence, patience, and space. Dr. Diane Langberg, who has spent her life among the wounded, often reminds us, “We dare not rush what God Himself is willing to sit with.” That is ministry: sitting beside, not speaking over.
The wisdom of mourning
The Jewish people understand this. When someone dies, the bereaved sit shiva — seven days of stillness and shared silence. Friends come not to fix but to accompany. Then comes sheloshim — 30 days to move slowly back toward life. For a parent, mourning extends a full year. Their wisdom tells us what our culture forgets: Mourning isn’t an interruption of life; it’s part of it.
We can learn from that rhythm. When tragedy strikes, our nation lowers its flags to half-staff. For a day or two, we pause, reflect, and pray. Then the flags rise again and life resumes. That is understandable for a country, but not for a soul. For the bereaved, the flag stays lowered long after the headlines fade.
Even the church can hurry the hurting. We mistake composure for recovery and public strength for peace. But grief that is forced to perform eventually breaks in private and sometimes spills into public.
When my wife, Gracie, lost her legs and entered decades of agony, healing did not come through attention or activity. It came through grace, tears, and time, mostly in obscurity. People see her sing or laugh and assume she has gotten over it, that she’s moved past it. What they do not see is that she had to redefine her life; this is her life. Someone once told me, “Process the pain privately, share the process publicly.” That wisdom has steadied us for years.
The quiet saints of suffering
Our culture is too quick to parade its wounded on stages when they would be better served by sitting in stillness, in pajamas or sweats, without having to put on makeup or smile for the cameras.
I’ve seen that truth in lives like Joni Eareckson Tada’s, who has lived with quadriplegia (paralysis affecting all four limbs and the torso) for nearly 60 years after a diving accident. In her, suffering has distilled faith into something deep and steady, strong enough to hold her and extend grace to others who suffer.
Forgiveness, like healing, takes time. To forgive is not to excuse or forget; it is to trust God with justice and mercy, believing He knows what we cannot. Forgiveness is faith expressed with open hands — the slow loosening of the grip around another’s throat.
Philip Yancey once observed that grace, like water, flows to the lowest places. That is where I have found it: in hospital corridors, in the lonely watches of the night, and in the long quiet of waiting rooms. Not in applause or attention, but in the hush where pain meets patience.
RELATED: The poisoned stream of culture is flowing through our churches
Photo by Anadolu / Contributor via Getty Images
The best model for us
Our culture distracts us from sorrow, rushing past pain as if speed can save us. “Don’t look in the rearview mirror,” people say. “Keep moving forward. Get past it.” But some wounds do not recede with distance. They remain, reshaping who we are and how we see the world. Grief, but only if we resist the urge to flee from it.
Scripture tells us that Jesus Himself was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). If He carried sorrow, then sorrow itself is not unclean. His setting apart for redemption doesn’t happen on cue, not in our timeframe. It unfolds in God’s time, often unseen and unhurried. Our pain, when entrusted to Him, becomes something consecrated, set apart not for ruin but for restoration. In His hands, our sorrow becomes sacred ground.
When trauma shatters a life, our calling is not to elevate but to shelter. We are called to stand nearby like those who sit shiva, unhurried and unafraid of silence. We can only observe another’s trauma, but God enters it. The wounds in His hands and side show us that He understands the anguish of loss, rejection, even death. His way is not avoidance but presence, and His model is a good one for us.
Solitude with God is not empty silence, but the stillness where His healing takes root. The psalmist wrote, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). In that quiet, we see what countless believers across the ages have discovered: Even what was meant for evil, God weaves for good. He does not waste our sorrow. When we trust His timing, the trauma observed gives way to the grace observed.
The poisoned stream of culture is flowing through our churches
On most days, the creek that runs behind our home in Montana looks like something out of a painting. The water tumbles over slick stones, swirls beneath the wooden bridge, and flashes like glass in the sunlight as it winds through the trees.
On hot afternoons, I take off my boots and stand in it awhile, letting the cold mountain water swirl around my feet. Even in August, it stays clear and shockingly cold — refreshing on hot, dusty feet. It looks so pure and inviting that you’d think you could cup your hands and drink from it.
The world’s water might soothe for a moment, but it can’t sustain. Only Christ, the living water, can cleanse, restore, and refresh a parched heart.
Yet I know better.
While helping a rancher move some cattle across the property, a few of them wandered down into that same creek. They lingered there, swishing tails and doing what cows do. The water still looked clear from a distance, but you certainly wouldn’t drink from it. Even a Supreme Court justice wouldn’t need a biologist to figure that out.
The water in that creek started high in the mountains, clean and cold. It was once pure, but animals do what animals do. People, though, take it further. We pollute on purpose. That’s not instinct; that’s sin.
We talk about free will, and we have it. But left to ourselves, we use it to wreck what was good. The culture isn’t just wandering into the water; it’s content to poison it, and sinners seem to care less about a polluted stream than cows do.
Downstream from belief
We’ve all heard that politics flows downstream from culture. But if you trace that current far enough, you’ll find that culture flows downstream from belief. Whatever people worship, they eventually legislate into law.
Today, we have ceased worshipping God. Instead, we bow before slogans, systems, and grievances that mollify us rather than giving worship to the one to whom it is due. From a distance, it all looks good — flowing with energy, language, and even a sense of virtue. But somewhere upstream, something has wandered into the water — or been poured into it.
Too often, the church is wading downstream, cup in hand, trying to stay “relevant” while drinking what has already been polluted. The poison is sin itself, the moral waste of self-worship that seeps in until it becomes part of the current.
When the church starts drinking downstream, the songs continue, the sermons sound familiar, and the branding shines. But the taste changes. Conviction weakens, holiness becomes optional, and relevance becomes everything. We echo the world’s vocabulary of identity and justice without the foundation of repentance and redemption. The message gets muddied, and we don’t even notice the shift.
And when that happens, the thirstiest suffer first. Those are the ones who come to church desperate for something real.
What really sticks
I’ve spent 40 years as a caregiver, and I’ve learned what real thirst feels like. When you’ve poured yourself out for years, almost any water looks good. You pray for strength, for truth, for something steady, and too often what comes back sounds like marketing. You sit in church and hear, “Claim your victory,” “Speak life,” or, “Step into your blessing,” and you wonder if anyone sees the wreckage you live with. Then, from another pulpit, you hear, “God understands,” “It’s not that bad,” or, “Everyone struggles.”
It sounds compassionate, but it isn’t. It’s corrosion.
The first slick of contamination began with the serpent questioning the Word of God, and all too many pulpits echo that same hiss today. They downplay sin, soften the edges, and serve up messages that keep people comfortable yet captive. They offer sympathy instead of repentance. That’s not grace; that’s decay.
Ornate and large pulpits don’t necessarily mean clean water. Visibility isn’t the same as vision. The purity of the message isn’t measured by the size of the platform of the one delivering it but by how faithfully it points upstream to Christ Himself.
Truth, the real kind, usually starts with one hard word: repent. It’s upstream, and it’s not easy to get there. But that’s where the water runs clean. Downstream, you’ll only find a little contamination, a little compromise, a little manure, and just enough to make you sick.
RELATED: Scripture or slogans — you have to choose
freedom007 via iStock/Getty Images
I’ve tested the various platitudes and slogans in the emergency room, ICU, and dark watches of the night more times than I can count. None of them hold up.
Here’s what does.
Only one water stays pure no matter who steps in it. It’s the same water that met a Samaritan woman at a well. It’s the same water Isaiah promised when he wrote, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” That’s the invitation — not just to the church, but to every soul that’s dry and staggering: Walk upstream.
Go upstream
When we drink deeply from that pure spring, holiness stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like oxygen. It gives clarity instead of confusion, courage instead of compromise.
That’s the call to the church and to every weary heart. Don’t drink what the world has trampled. Don’t settle for water that only looks clean from a distance. Polluted streams can’t quench the thirst of thirsty people.
The world’s water might soothe for a moment, even cool our weary feet, but it can’t sustain us. Only Christ, the living water, can cleanse, restore, and refresh a parched heart.
So go upstream. The source is still pure, and it’s still flowing.
