The reader writes:

On a much more serious note:

The reader writes:

Last year’s Christmas was at our home in South Africa, just my wife, our two young kids, and my wife’s mom – no other family within thousands of miles. You posted our picture in last year’s “View from Your Christmas Table”, Skyping with family in North America. This year we’re back in my Pennsylvania hometown, celebrating with my parents and every one of my six siblings, plus spouses and kids of those who have them. It’s been a blessing, an unexpected joy. But the only reason we’re here at all is that back in April my wife was diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumors, a rare form of cancer. We immediately uprooted our family and moved back to the U.S. in May, abandoning our hopes and plans of a long pastorate in Durban after only two years. It’s a strange feeling – to have such joy at being here with my birth family mixed with gut-level pain at being absent from a congregation we had fallen in love with. But that’s Christmas, isn’t it? It’s not all joy and gladness – there is the labor and birth with no room in the inn, the sword foretold through Mary’s heart, the desperate flight to a foreign land. My wife’s cancer is terminal, although it is slow-growing and we expect years and even decades more for her. But this darkest of times for our family has brought more love and miracles into our lives than we knew was possible. It’s hard. It feels pretty bleak sometimes. But to experience all that love, and then to know that infinite Love was made incarnate 2,000 years ago, that He is here now – that is more than enough.