Tag: christmas

Permission to be Human

The holiday season arrives each year dressed in bright lights and confident cheer, announcing itself as a time when everyone is supposed to feel warm, grateful, and whole. Songs insist on joy. Social media posts glow with parties and matching sweaters. Calendars fill with gatherings and traditions. But sometimes this season quietly overlaps with something much heavier: reality—illness, exhaustion, and a sadness that feels out of place among all the celebration.

Being sick during the holidays carries a particular loneliness. Sickness already narrows the world—your body asks you to slow down, to cancel plans, to listen closely to discomfort. When it coincides with a season that emphasizes togetherness and energy, that narrowing can feel like exclusion and loneliness. You may watch celebrations from a distance, physically or emotionally unable to participate. Even minor illnesses can feel larger in December, as if they are stealing something precious and irreplaceable.

There is also the emotional weight of feeling “down” when happiness seems mandatory. Feeling anything less than cheerful during the holidays often brings guilt along with it—the sense that you are wasting something special, that you should be more thankful, more cheerful, more present. This pressure can make sadness feel like a personal failure rather than a human response. It can be difficult to admit you are struggling when everything around you insists this is the season of joy.

And so a cycle forms. When the body is weak or in pain, the mind grows heavy. When the mind is heavy, the body feels even more tired. Days blur together. Things that once brought comfort and excitement—decorating, cooking, visiting—may feel like an extra chore. Instead of anticipation, there is endurance. Instead of celebration, there’s perseverance. 

A few nights ago, I woke in the darkness with intense back pain. I rolled carefully in bed, trying not to wake Aaron. He has been especially busy at work with end-of-year planning, and I didn’t want to disturb his sleep. As the night went on, I found myself in pain and needing the restroom every thirty minutes. I had no choice in the matter—despite all my effort, my restlessness woke Aaron. Though I knew what was happening, I didn’t want to admit I needed help. If I was sick and went to the hospital, there was a real chance I could end up admitted. And that would ruin Christmas for the whole family. So, I convinced him I could wait it out.

By morning, I felt better and proudly announced to my family, “I passed a kidney stone last night.” I assumed the worst was behind me. The next day we went holiday shopping, watched a movie, and I cuddled my granddaughter—quietly congratulating myself for getting through that awful night without intervention.

The following evening, after a beautiful Christmas Sunday at church, the pain returned. Slowly at first, then steadily worsening. As it intensified, so too did the realization that I needed help. A fever followed, and the night became a long stretch of pain and discomfort. Again, I tried not to wake Aaron. He had client appointments the next day, along with a Christmas lunch for his employees. How could I interrupt that?

By morning, he insisted on driving me to the emergency room. I urged Aaron to leave and attend to his commitments—I was trying to be strong. After tests confirmed a kidney stone and a kidney infection, and after receiving IV antibiotics, to my relief, I was discharged. Without a car to drive myself home, I wandered the hospital after stopping at the pharmacy, waiting for Aaron to finish and come pick me up.

A hospital during the holidays is an interesting place. In the midst of suffering—patients arriving and leaving with varying levels of anxiety, pain, and sadness—there are Christmas trees, ribbons, and people dressed in holiday cheer. The contrast can feel jarring. In all the noise and festivity of Christmas, the quiet plight of the sick can feel overlooked.

But as I waited, I witnessed something unexpected.

Near the main entrance, a group of hospital employees—some wearing Santa hats—gathered around the information desk. They were visibly excited, anticipating something. A delivery was coming. “There are thirty-two more boxes!” someone exclaimed. “That’s about sixteen hundred total!” another replied. Their faces lit up with amazement.

Soon, volunteers arrived pushing carts stacked high with boxes. Inside were children’s books—gifts for children spending the holidays in the hospital. But the books weren’t the real gift.

The real gift was written on faces. The volunteers delivering the boxes and the staff receiving them glowed with joy, excitement, and hope—hope that their efforts might brighten someone else’s holiday, even in a small way.

Last year, to mark the first anniversary of my heart transplant, I donated fifty satin pillowcases to the hospital for transplant patients. Each one was wrapped with a bow and included a note of encouragement—something I knew would have lifted my own spirits during my hospital stays. I never saw them distributed. I never received a thank-you. Yet the act of giving brought me immense joy. The benefactor became the recipient.

But acts of charity during the holidays don’t have look grand—humble, simple things work just as well.  Things as simple as patience in a checkout line, anonymous generosity, choosing compassion when it would be easier to rush past all help in little-yet-persuasive ways. These moments don’t erase pain or sickness, but they remind us that gentleness still exists. And sometimes that’s all we need to restore our hope. Because sometimes hope doesn’t come from summoning strength within ourselves, but from witnessing how willingly others offer theirs.

The holidays are often portrayed as a dreamscape of cheer and togetherness. But in real life, holiday magic doesn’t always arrive as excitement or optimism. More often, it arrives quietly—in kindness witnessed when you are still enough to notice, in generosity unfolding around you, in the trust that this moment is not permanent even when you cannot yet imagine what comes next. Hope doesn’t require certainty; it only asks for openness.

Here I offer permission to be human. If this holiday season finds you ill or feeling down, let that be okay. Let it be a chapter, not a verdict. Care for yourself in the ways you can. Accept care when it is offered. Release the idea that you must perform joy to deserve this season. Even now—especially now—you are allowed to be human.

And when you look ahead, past the decorations and the calendar and this heavy moment, remember this: the light you are waiting for does not disappear when you are sick or sad. It shows itself in generosity, in patience, in quiet acts of care. The holidays will pass. Your strength will return. Lighter days are ahead. Hope is already here, quietly at work, even when all you can do is rest.

A Story For Christmas

n the very cold, very brutal Pennsylvania winter of 1983, my parents found themselves looking for a new place for our little family to live. 

My stepdad had been working as a farm hand, repairing farm and milking equipment for an old couple that owned a dairy in the tiny town of Shippenville.  As part of his pay, we were allowed to live in a small, nearly dilapidated old house with a sagging roof and rotting porch that was next to the barnyard on their property.  As awful as the house sounds, it was charming to me. The surrounding countryside was nothing short of Idyllic in my childhood memory, with horses and cattle grazing in bucolic fields. My older sister and I helped out on the farm by assisting with the milking every morning and afternoon, tending to the chickens and turkeys and pulling weeds in the vegetable garden. We played for hours in the barn, jumping from the haylofts and playing hide-and-seek. We loved it there as children. We were sad to be leaving.

Unfortunately, earlier that fall, after a gloriously warm summer, we were awakened in the middle of the night by the bright glow of fire outside. The three-story barn was in flames—fully engulfed.  Despite the best efforts of the local fire department, the barn burned to the ground. The farmer had just finished hauling in all the hay and oats from the field. Despite warnings from my stepdad that the hay was wet and in the warmth should not be stored in the barn, the farmer loaded it into the barn anyway. Large fans ran on the crop day and night to keep it dry and to keep mold at bay. And it had been an electrical spark from one of the fans that ignited the fire that burned the barn and everything in it.

The crop of hay and oats, gone.

Left without a barn, the tools and crops it housed and the milking equipment adjacent to it, the old farmer had no way of making money. He was forced to sell the farm and land. Including the little house we lived in.

Finding housing in a crunch in such a rural community took great providence, and by December of that year, my parents felt providence was certainly not smiling on them. I am sure desperate prayers were said.

Finally, on the day before Christmas Eve that year, they found an apartment for rent in the neighboring town of Seneca. The apartment was on the second floor above a small factory that made cemetery vaults—not exactly home-sweet-home. But it was good enough for us, for a time.

The next hurdle that needed jumping was moving our family and all our belongings on the night before Christmas Eve. We had no family near us as western Pennsylvania was not our native home. My mom had moved my sister and I from Utah to Pennsylvania after her divorce 5 years earlier. And after she married our step-dad, we had basically lived like nomads, moving wherever there was work. While we had a church community, our congregation was small and geographically spread all over the area. We were poor, and nearly alone. And we only had one little car to our name. There was no U-haul rental nearby. We had access to neither truck, nor trailer.

To top it off, a storm had blown in. That area was prone to lake effect snow and brutal Canadian winds. The wind chill on that night was 60 below zero. 

It sure didn’t feel like Christmas time. And I remember being disappointed—worried even. We had no Christmas tree, no decorations, no tinsel, no gifts, and no angel on top of the tree to help us remember Christ. I feared there really would be no Christmas.

We spent the majority of that day boxing up our things, taking apart furniture, basically working and moving and moving and working and only pausing now and then to ponder how we were going to get everything to our new place with only our little car to take it all.

I’m not sure how this happened—being a child at the time, most things just seemed to miraculously come to pass. Now, through the lens of adulthood, I recognize my parents must have prayed and put out a call for help—and then prayed some more. But somehow, a decent number of farmers from the surrounding community, began pulling up unceremoniously in front of our little old farmhouse. They brought their trucks, trailers and hay wagons and, in the bitter cold of that night, loaded up our belongings and carried them to our tiny apartment in the neighboring town more than a 30 minute drive away. 

But they didn’t stop there. Despite the ice and cold, they then unloaded all the boxes and furnishings and carefully carried them up the long, narrow flight of stairs and placed them in our new home, before returning to their own homes and own families to finish their many chores and prepare for their Christmas celebrations.

And then, just to make the holiday a little more Christmas-like, someone, one of those blessed farmers, returned to our apartment with a Christmas tree. I still remember that tree. To me, with the recollection of a child, it was tall and fat, and sitting on the very top was the most beautiful angel smiling down on us, reminding me of heaven and the true meaning of Christmas. That tree and the angel on top magically drown out those feelings of worry and disappointment I had had earlier. The memory lasts to this day.

Even though Christmas two years ago—the year of my heart transplant—was truly miraculous for our family, filled with more service than we could ever hope to repay and forever sacred to us, the Christmas we spent in Seneca, Pennsylvania will always stand out. That was the year I learned that the greatest gifts are those that remind us what truly matters: hope, kindness, and the light of Christ we carry within.

In the words of Jeffery R. Holland, “Not all angels are from the other side of the veil. Some of them, we walk with and talk with—here, now, every day. … Indeed, Heaven never seems closer than when we see the love of God manifested in the kindness and devotion of people so good and so pure that angelic is the only word that comes to mind.”

May we each, this Christmas, be that angel for someone else. May we follow a prompting, answer a call, have the faith to say yes, and serve each other as Christ serves us.