Christmas is now behind us. The presents are opened, the programs are over, and family have headed back to their own homes. Charles Stanley once said his favorite Christmas lights were the taillights on the cars as everybody headed back home. Now all that’s left is cleaning up and taking down the lights and decorations. (Remember, everything you put up, you have to take down.) Oh yeah, there’s also the paying for those presents and experiences of the Christmas season, as many wait with dread for that credit card bill to come in January.
While we have celebrated the good news of Jesus coming over the past few weeks, there have been many who have been dealing with not so good news. As a matter of fact, it has been bad news, life-altering news.
Ben Sasse is a former U.S. senator from Nebraska, who represented the state from 2015 to 2023. He was a common sense conservative, who actually believed in ideas like financial responsibility and self-reliance. In the Progressive, MAGA world of Washington, he really didn’t fit in, and after years of service, he resigned to become president of the University of Florida in 2023. He left that position in 2024 to help take care of his wife, who was having major health issues.
Ben Sasse shared some not so good news a few days ago. The 53-year-old ex-senator posted on X that he has been diagnosed with “metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer.” While not that common, pancreatic cancer is, as he called it, “a death sentence.” But as he continued to write, the bad news of the cancer is countered by the good news of Christmas.
He wrote, “Advanced pancreatic cancer is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week — we all do.” As a friend told him, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.”
He continued on the post, “There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come. Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope, often we lazily say ‘hope’ when what we mean is ‘optimism.’ To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pop they’re gonna bury their son.”
Wow, that’s hard stuff. Sasse continues in the post, “A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer is not yet.”
That doesn’t mean he’s giving up. Sasse continues on the post, “I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jaw-dropping advances science has made in the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying are not the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived.”
I look around and I admire folks who have dealt with this process during this season with grace, courage, hope, and that “stiffer stuff” that Sasse shared in his post.
Remember those, like Ben Sasse and his family, who are dealing with bad news this Christmas season. But be thankful for the good news of Christmas because, “we’re all on the clock.”