A Memorable Christmas

Welcome to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger and this is the program for you as a family caregiver here on American Family Radio.

I'm so glad that you are with us. If you want to find out more about what we do, why we do it, who we do it for, and the way we do it, we'd love to connect with you. We have all kinds of things for you out at the website and if you are a caregiver in distress, I have a little button there that says caregiver 911. Start there.

That's as good a place as any to start. I've got some things for you that I think will help settle you down right now. Settle you down right now because a lot of times as caregivers we are reacting, not responding.

And that is the challenge for all of us. And please do not think for one moment that I have this under control because I don't. I just know where the path is now.

So when I veer off the road, which is often, I know where the road is and we get back to it. And I wanted to open up the program today as we go into the holiday season. And I love this time of year as far as the music and everything else. But I also recognize that it can be a very difficult time of year for most people. Certainly this time last year we were in the hospital. Gracie was in the neuro ICU at Denver and we stayed there. Wow, we were there on the 10th floor there looking, let's see in the ICU part, we were there for about 10 days. And then she transferred to a regular room and we spent Christmas, New Year s, her birthday, Valentine s Day all there at the hospital.

So it was a pretty challenging season last year. And I ve got an article I wrote about that in this month s issue of Mature Living magazine put out by LifeWay. Now this is not an online magazine. It s a beautiful glossy magazine that they do every month. And I am a featured writer now for the next year. And I have an article every month in this. And you can go out and see this now. It s a wonderful magazine.

I think you would like it a lot. But this particular article that I wrote talks about Christmas in an unexpected place. I didn t want to be in the hospital.

Gracie certainly didn t want to be in the hospital. But what happened during that time and the title of the article is called Tidings of Comfort and Joy, A Hospital Christmas Story. And I think you ll find it quite meaningful. I won t read the whole article here on the program.

I don t like to read on the program very much. And so it shares about some things that we learned through this process. And I will read this. I carry the lessons learned from that hospital room, a reminder of the beauty that emerges when we trust God with harsh circumstances and open our hearts to the possibility of experiencing His grace in unexpected places. While the crude setting of the first Christmas sounds less ideal than our hospital one, it was decreed from eternity past. God was there. Christ the Savior was born which made it unique, memorable and filled with tidings of comfort and joy.

Each place and event becomes special when Christ is worshipped, even in a hospital room during Christmas. So if you want to subscribe to their magazine, I m sure you would find it very meaningful. They have a lot of good stuff in there. And like I said, I write a column every month in that magazine. And I m really excited for you to be able to read them. And I m looking forward to sharing those with so many of their readers. And I hope you ll become one of them.

They do a good job with it. But this is a tough time of year. How many of you all have spent Christmas in a hospital? And how many of you guys have had to do that or in New Year s and so forth and so on?

If you re a caregiver for any length of time, chances are you re going to run into that challenge. So what do you do about it? You don t want to be there. Your loved one doesn t want to be there. It s not fun.

What do you do? How many of you all have spent Christmas at home with things that are just less than ideal? And I want to caution you. Don t put this undue pressure on yourself to make Christmas what it used to be.

Don t trip over something behind you, okay? As a friend of mine says, Nostalgia is not everything it used to be. So we don t have to do it.

We can make new memories. And I will tell you, we live in Montana. And we have snow and everything that that implies in the Montana Rockies for Christmas. Everything that people think of when they think of Christmas in our western culture, we have it. Now if you want to have Christmas in Orlando at Disney World, you go right ahead. That is not something I particularly aspire to. I don t particularly want to go to Disney World.

I don t want to ever do the Magic Kingdom Death March again. But there are people I know that love that or people that want to have Christmas on a cruise ship or Christmas in the island somewhere. And that s fine. Have it wherever you want to have it.

Do whatever you want to do. But for us, we ve always loved the snow and the winter experience of Christmas. We have Narnia out here long before Aslan showed up. Now some of you who are CS Lewis fans are going to get that and that s funny.

And you should all laugh right now at this appropriate time because that is funny. But we have Christmas, it looks like Christmas out here about six months out of the year. People say, Don t you ever get tired of the snow? No, we don t. And I would also encourage you while you re in the reading mood, Gracie is writing a short blog every month. And it s how she deals with pain. And she s got one out at our website that will be out this month about snow and why she likes it so much.

What it means to her. And if it s not posted yet, it will be shortly, but if you want to make sure you get that post, go out to PeterRosenberger.com, scroll down and you ll see where it says sign up our e-letter. And you can sign up and we ll get that. It s a free e-letter.

We send it out once a month. And she s been doing this once a month on her blog to write about it. Because I asked her a while back, I said, Do you want to write about anything else? You haven t written a book. And I said, Maybe get you know, you re not doing anything.

You re not working it up. No, I didn t say that. I asked her if she had some things she wanted to say. She said, I ve been really thinking about pain because I live with it so much that if I wrote anything, it would be about how I deal with this horrific amount of pain that I deal with.

And I thought, Well, that s a very good thing to write about because there s so many people who are hurting. And we all want to hear from somebody who has weathered this for a lifetime. They say, Okay, how do you get through this? How do you endure?

How do you persevere? And she s got one this month that talks about snow and how that has helped her. She grew up in the panhandle of Florida where Christmas was hot. And she hated it. She thought it was just, you know, sacrilegious to have a hot Christmas.

She took it very personally. She said, I m going to live somewhere where there s a lot of snow. Well, darn if she didn t do it because we live in Montana, way up in the Rockies. We re up about 6,000 feet. And we have plenty of snow.

And it is beautiful. And I love our Christmas that we get to have. We ve gone out many years on snowmobiles and other different machines to cut our own tree. Do that this year.

I m tempted to wait for my son to come out here with us so he can go out and help me. But we usually cut our own tree. We have the horses running alongside.

And you can see some of my social media posts out there with the horses running in the snow. And we have a fire going. We have everything that you would think of for a Courier Knives Christmas. And last year we were in the hospital.

We didn t get to have any of those things. I had a little tiny tree I bought at Walgreens. And I put lights around the hospital room. And I brought a keyboard in to play Christmas carols.

And it was certainly less than ideal. But it was a spectacular Christmas for us. It was a very memorable one. In many respects it s even more memorable than all of the other Courier Knives Christmases that we ve had. And I m not dismissing one and saying this was better.

It s just different. But it gave us an opportunity to reflect on what does this mean at Christmas for us. What is the whole point of this? And as caregivers we can get caught up in the traditions and the nostalgia and the sentiment of what we re supposed to do. It may be mom s last one.

That kind of thing. Or we ve got to do it otherwise they re not going to be happy. We make Christmas however we want. Last year we did it in a hospital room. This year we ll do it out here. But you know it s going to be what it s going to be. The main thing is are we worshipping our God for sending a Savior to be with us.

Immanuel. And that s kind of the whole point isn t it? And that is hope for the caregiver. And this is Peter Rosenberger and we will be right back.

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger and this is the caregiver keyboard playing a great Christmas hymn that I first knew was a Christmas hymn. The tune has been used many times.

It s called Heiferdahl. But listen to what Charles Wesley wrote here. It s just a great hymn. And again I first knew this hymn is Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. My dad would always have this played at the first Sunday Advent. When it was composed the tune of this, Heiferdahl, the guy named Roland Pritchard wrote that tune back in 1844.

He was 19 years old at the time. It s been used for like Hallelujah What a Savior, Jesus what a friend for sinners. But I always knew it as Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. Only two verses of it and Charles Wesley wrote this that we owe such a debt to Charles Wesley and just for the amazing hymns that he s written. This one though, Israel s Hope and Consolation.

You know where that s from? Do you know the story about the old man Simeon? In Luke 2 when Mary and Joseph went to present Jesus in Jerusalem there was a man named Simeon and this man was righteous and devout. I m reading in 2 25 waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord s Christ. Not the Lord Christ, the Lord s Christ. In other words, God s Messiah that he sent. And he was waiting for the consolation of Israel. He broke into this song called in Latin the Nunc Dimittis.

N-U-N-C-D-I-M-I-T-T-I-S. Nunc Dimittis. And it s sovereign Lord as you have promised you may now dismiss your servant in peace for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the sight of all nations, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel. It s a beautiful song and a beautiful story. But it s made referred to Christ as the consolation of Israel. Now why is that important to us as caregivers?

Why am I reading this? You know because I am overwhelmed when I look at scripture of God s mercy that he repeatedly pours out and states in scripture. I spent a lifetime with my prayer being God heal her. God fix this.

God bail us out. Do something God. And I say that with great shame and great embarrassment and cringe.

I told you one of these days I m going to write a book called Cringe My Life as a Caregiver of all the cringe worthy things that I ve done. And it s taken me a lifetime to go back and understand that he already did something. He already did it. And what he did was so magnificent that you can t help but burst forth into song like Charles Wesley does with that great tune of Heiferdahl. And it just erupts when it says Israel s strength and consolation. Hope of all the earth thou art. Dear desire of every nation. Joy of every longing heart. Born thy people to deliver. Born a child and yet a king. Born to reign in us forever. Now thy gracious kingdom bring by thine own eternal spirit rule in all our hearts alone.

By thine all sufficient merit raise us to thy glorious throne. Charles Wesley could write a hymn. You ve heard me say this and I m not trying to chastise people but I would really encourage you to get your hymnal out. We ve done a disservice to so many in our culture by putting hymnals on the shelf, letting them get covered with dust.

Pick them up. Read through the text. People who were incredibly gifted lyricists took the time to write down extraordinary texts that encompass what they call compact theology.

Okay? Compact theology is when it says a great theological truth in a very short, like it sounds, compact way of saying it. It s like the old hymn Jesus thy blood and righteousness.

You know that one? Well, what have we just said there? Jesus thy blood, which atones for us, but his righteousness is imputed to us. In one sentence we just said a powerful statement of compact theology. So what Charles Wesley has done in this column that I long expected Jesus born to set thy people free from our fears and sins releases let us find our rest in the Israel strength and consolation. Why do we even care what that means?

What is your life like as a caregiver? Would you benefit from consolation? You know, of course we would. We are dealing with such horrific things on any given day. Watching someone we love deteriorate, decline or suffer.

These are painful things to do. And yet we have one who is the consolation of Israel. A lot of times we think of the paraclete as the Holy Spirit, the comforter.

It was called the comforter. But who was the original paraclete? Well, it was Christ. Jesus said, if you remember, he said, I m going to send another helper.

But he s the first. He s the consolation of Israel. He s our consolation. And, you know, dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart. Charles Wesley just wrote this beautiful text in there. And, again, this is, you know, a hymn that is traditionally sung during Advent and certainly the first week of Advent. And, you know, you ve got another one, Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel.

And I ll probably pull that one out on the caregiver keyboard. Some of you don t care about what Advent is, and I understand that. Some of you have not been brought up that way.

I was. The liturgical season, the church calendar, these are important things to me. And it reminds me of certain things, and I m very grateful for it.

What does it mean? Well, the word Advent comes from the Latin word Adventus, which it s the coming or the arrival. It was originally a time of anticipatory celebration and preparation for celebrating Epiphany. But during this season of, you know, preparation and during Advent, in the early church, Christians would spend 40 days in penance, prayer, and fasting.

And they would just to prepare for this. And there was very little connection with Christmas. Christmas holiday was kind of a hijacked winter solstice type of holiday, I think, that we kind of incorporated in the church calendar, which that s for theologians and apologists smarter than me to figure out.

I just appreciate the fact that we drill into our brains that there is a preparation for the birth of Christ as we celebrate that, and we remember this remarkable event that God did what nobody could ve envisioned. He became flesh. And he said this way back in Genesis 3, which many people refer to as the first gospel, because God told Adam and Eve what was going to happen thousands upon thousands of years later. They didn t know that at the time, but he said this is going to happen. In fact, Eve was convinced it was going to happen sooner because when her first child was born, she thought that was the promised child.

Well, you know, God s giving me a son. She was thinking this is the one. That, of course, wasn t what God had planned, but she was mistaken about the timing, but her faith was not misplaced in believing God that he was going to do what he said he was going to do. In fact, if you ll notice, the only time in scripture where the angels come out en masse to erupt into praise was at the birth of Christ. Angels, we have heard on high.

I ll get to that one, too. But that s the only time they did that, because God did what he said he was going to do against all odds. Think about all that had to happen to preserve that line and to preserve that promise, to fulfill every one of those prophecies about Jesus and his heritage, and God did it. And so Israel s hope and consolation, and Simeon was sitting there waiting for this, and when he finally saw Jesus, he was able to die in peace, because the Holy Spirit had communicated to him, Hey, you re not going to die until you see the Lord s Christ, the Lord s Messiah, the Lord s Savior that he has sent.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder. That s from Isaiah, which was wonderfully set to music by Handel in the Messiah. So the music of the season is incredibly important, and I know we all love some of the secular tunes, and maybe even some of you all like All I Want for Christmas by Mariah Carey. I hope we can elevate our taste a little bit more than Jingle Bell Rock.

There s Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree. I used to see Brenda Lee in the grocery store there in Nashville where we shopped, where we lived. She was in there all the time. Little tiny lady. And one time I got a video of her singing that to me. It was so much fun, and she was a delightful little lady. And I love all of those kinds of Christmas songs. Certainly Mel Torme, Just Nuts, Roasting.

I love all those things. But these hymns have such weight to them, and we would serve ourselves well, particularly as caregivers, to just thumb through them and sit and think about the lyrics for a few moments of what it means to us as people who deal with very painful things. Simeon waited his life to be able to see Christ, and he did. He didn t understand probably everything. He didn t understand what the cross meant and all those kinds of things. That part of it is not clearly put out, and I don t think he probably did. But he knew that God sent a Savior. Do you know that?

Do you know that today? Because when you go into this Christmas season as a caregiver, you re going to be put upon to do a lot of things. The stress is there to buy gifts, to do this and do this and make meals and decorate and all these kinds of things. And you re going to get tired. You re going to get frustrated. You re going to get exasperated.

You re going to wonder, What is this all about? I just want to be quiet somewhere. And I get that. But we can erupt with music and praise and worship because of Israel s hope and consolation. And I remember playing this last year at the hospital. I stayed across the street in a hotel, and I would leave in the evening time, and there was a big grand piano down there in the atrium lobby and just the security guards.

And I would play these Christmas hymns. And I thought I was just playing for the guards. But it turns out I looked at the second floor balcony above, and there were patients and their families coming to the railing there. Some of them had IV poles and so forth, and they were listening.

And I was just playing for them. I saw smiles. I saw tears.

I saw grateful faces. This music helps us transcend all of these heartbreaking things that we deal with and lifts our hearts to say, Come thou long expected Jesus. Israel s hope and consolation. Our hope and consolation. And that is hope for the caregiver. And this is Peter Rosenberger, and we will be right back.

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. And that is, of course, Handel s Messiah and the Glory of the Lord, one of my favorite selections from that amazing work. And I never get tired of hearing it. It was written smaller than what it s become over the years. Originally it was written more of a chamber orchestra kind of thing, not a large amount of voices. And you didn t have a huge orchestra. You had a small group and a small group of singers. But over the years it kind of morphed. I think at one point it was performed a choir of 600.

And then it went back to a smaller amount. I remember doing it when I was in high school with a choir of about 100 people and a full orchestra. And it was huge. And I remember the guy that directed it.

He had worked with the he worked on Robert Shaw at the Atlanta Symphony. And it was wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely. I like the bigger choir personally because I think that these choruses that Handel wrote were so phenomenal that not just the Hallelujah Chorus, but Worthy is the Lamb, and blessing and honor, glory and power be unto Him, be unto Him that sinneth upon the throne and unto the Lamb. When you hear this massive number of men singing that out at the beginning of that little section of Worthy is the Lamb, it s something. It is powerful. And I think that we ll be in heaven and it ll be just the right number. I don t know what the right number is, but when we get there it ll be just the right number. I wonder if Handel will direct it.

I don t know. But it was I never get tired of hearing it. I was talking about the last block when the angels showed up, and the glory, the glory of the it makes me think of that when you have the appearance of the angels there too. I love it. I love the Christmas music. I won t do everything that s highbrow, I promise, but there s so much wonderful music at Christmas time.

Speaking of which, I would like to tell you that we have it is the end of the year. And if you are looking to do something at the end of the year for an organization, there are two that come to mind. One of them is American Family Radio, and I think that they would welcome your support. If you are getting anything out of what this program is doing, would you consider partnering with them? They are tirelessly promoting the Gospel 24-7.

My mom has told me many times that during the lowest points of caring for my father and the last bit of his life, she would in the middle of the night if she was up dealing with whatever, she could turn on American Family Radio and always hear somebody telling her about Jesus. And I would encourage you to support this organization. They do a phenomenal job. They work hard. These are great people. And they could use your support.

And another one would be Standing with Hope. And that s the ministry Gracie and I started. We have two outreaches, the Prosthetic Limb Outreach and the Caregiver Outreach. It s for the wounded and those who care for them. And we put legs on people and tell them about Jesus. We talk to fellow caregivers and tell them about Jesus.

And it s that simple. And we would welcome your help for either of those. It s standingwithhope.com slash giving. Standingwithhope.com slash giving if you want to be a part of what we re doing and share it with others. We give the gift that keeps on walking.

So, thank you so much for that. Speaking of the caregiver ministry, I have a weekly thing I put out on my Substack page caregiver.substack.com. And I put out a chapter for my book A Minute for Caregivers when every day feels like Monday s free subscription for that. And this week s posting I think is a very timely posting for Christmas because a lot of times as family come in and they see you and maybe a loved one that you re caring for or friends that come by and see you haven t seen in a while and you get together at Thanksgiving or Christmas or the holidays or parties or whatever and people want to criticize you. Have any of you all ever been criticized as a caregiver? Have you ever had anyone rail on you a bit for what you re doing?

Well, this is for you. And the title of this is called And the Critics Say. And it s from A Minute for Caregivers when every day feels like Monday. A friend shared the recent criticism while struggling to care for her husband. Already reeling from significant heartache resulting from her husband s condition, the scolding rocked her.

You should have done this or you should have done that. All too many spectators feel emboldened to offer advice to caregivers shouldering the challenges of caregiving. Sometimes non-caregivers bypass advice and go straight to criticizing.

I suppose it saves time. As a rule, the best opinions to heed usually come from those possessing training and education relating to the impairment of your loved one. For example, if you re dealing with an orthopedic problem, then talk with an orthopedic surgeon, orthopedist. If you re dealing with a neurological problem, you ought to talk with a neurologist. And so on.

You know the deal. My four decades as a caregiver has taught me an additional rule. The best counsel regarding your journey as a caregiver often comes from those with credible experience. There remains no shortage of opinions from those not doing the work. Those criticisms, if allowed, can wound the soul of a caregiver struggling to do her best. You ever felt like your soul was wounded because of the way people are talking to you and beating on you and criticizing you?

Sometimes they do it in Christian verbiage. That s the worst to me. I hate that.

I truly do. And we re already dealing with a self-image that is beaten down because we see our own failures. And we don t need anybody to come and tell us everything we re doing wrong. We need people to stand with us and help us catch our breath. When tempted to let critics assess your value as a caregiver by job performance, be fair and look at your attendance record.

You keep showing up to care. Critics only show up to judge. And I love this quote that I used in this chapter from Theodore Roosevelt. You may have heard this quote before. A very famous quote of his, The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive? The man in the arena. That s what that quote is referred to.

It s a very famous quote of his. The credit belongs to the one in the arena. Who actually does strive to do this? I do not enjoy watching any contest, sports, music, or anything else, and watch the audience. I watch the performer. I watch the one on stage.

I watch the one who is on the field, the one who is on the mound, who is on the ice skating rink. Whatever the field of battle, whether it s a literal battle with soldiers or whether it s a physical contest or whatever, it s the ones who are striving, the participants, not the spectators who get the credit. The spectators don t get the credit. They re there just to get credit for watching. That s one of the things I really struggle with journalists about because they don t actually do anything. They just report on people who do. Journalists, I think, sometimes forget that that s the job. I think we got into a lot of problems in our country because journalists seem to think they were part of the story, but they re not.

They re just there to report the story. You are doing something extraordinary as a caregiver. Make no mistake about this, and please do not ever forget about it. What you re doing is extraordinary. And if nobody is willing to do it with you, help you, assist you, encourage you, then why in the world would you listen to them criticize you? Who are they? Who are they to offer anything other than, you know, affirmation, encouragement, assistance, and ultimately point you to Christ? If they re not doing any of those things, then what are they doing? Why are they in your life?

And I m sorry, that sounds a little bit blunt, and I don t mean it to be cold, but how difficult is your life when you say it s difficult enough for you to cut out people who are just dragging you down? You don t have to be bombastic and burn the bridge, but you don t have to necessarily allow them access. And in the holidays, our guard is down. Our guard s down in the holidays. We re already kind of emotional. We re tired. It s the end of the year or whatever. You know, we got all kinds of sentiment and nostalgia wrapped up into this thing.

Our guard s down. And there are people out there who are professional critics when it comes to other people doing something. You know it and I know it. I mean, I m not one of, you know, food critics or, you know, entertainment critics, but I m just talking about this is what they do. They feel it s incumbent upon them to constantly be, you know, evaluating how other people are doing something. And the currency they get for it is attention.

You know, if you re a food critic, you get paid to go and evaluate somebody s restaurant because you have an expertise in this and you want to give them good feedback on it and hopefully with the intent of improving it. But these people are not, you know this. You ve run into these people and if you haven t, give it time.

You will. They re not doing this for your benefit. They re doing this for their own because it gives them what they really want, which is attention. So don t give it to them. What does God have to say about you?

And if you don t know, then I would suggest maybe the best place for you to go is to your scriptures because he has an awful lot to say about this matter of taking care of people, of ministering to people, of pleading your case before him. There are people that can evaluate what you re doing that are trained professionals and they can give you good feedback and help you do it better. There are people like me who ve been doing this for a very long time who can give you good feedback and help you back away from things that are dangerous. But if you hear anybody come to you and they don t have any skin in the game, professionally, academically training-wise, or street cred, and they start railing on you, stay away from those people. Okay? Stay away from those people.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. Wise words from Theodore Roosevelt. Caregiving is hard enough. Let s build one another up.

Let s not tear one another down, okay? That is what gives us hope for the caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger, PeterRosenberger.com. This is hope for the caregiver.

We ll be right back. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger and that is Amy Grant with Breath of Heaven. A beautiful song that I know is a favorite of just so many millions. A fabulous, fabulous song.

She does Christmas music like few can. I want to close today with something as I m kind of preparing us for Christmas because I think as caregivers we carry a lot of conflicting emotions that many don t have and this can be a tough time. I ve got a friend of mine who just buried his father. My father died in September. A friend of mine called me just this week and his wife passed away.

He s been caring for her with Alzheimer s. Another friend, her husband, dementia, Alzheimer s. And I just go down the list of there s so many people just in my circle who are having their first Christmas without their loved one. When I started this program, when I started doing everything that I do for family caregivers, I made myself a promise that I would do whatever was in my abilities to strengthen and equip and bolster up the family caregiver. Doing this as long as I have and talking to as many thousands of caregivers as I have done, I know that caregiving doesn t stop at the cemetery. The impact of what happens to us as caregivers extends sometimes for the rest of our lives. I mean think about me for example. There s no going back should anything happen to Gracie or if I should outlive Gracie. I m not going to go back to what I was prior. This has forever changed me and I m conditioned in certain ways and I m going to carry different kinds of grief and scars and everything else from this journey in rather profound ways. We all do. That s just the nature of it. God will sort that out when we get to heaven.

He ll work all that out. But while we re in this earth, we grieve. I wanted to close today with a recording that I did some years ago with a guy on the violin. And it was at our church in Nashville. And I did an arrangement of the Old Rigged Cross. We played it live during communion. And I combined it with Near the Cross. Both of these are just wonderful hymns.

And the reason I m doing this is because my friend Frank s wife Peggy died this week. And she was an exceptional violinist. And I have the privilege of being the last person to accompany her musically before she had to put it down due to Alzheimer s. She would play in church and I would accompany her and sometimes I d just stop playing because her music was so fabulous.

I don t have a recording of anything she and I did together. But I do have a recording of Daniel and I playing the Old Rigged Cross. And I can t help but think of Peggy when I play this and when I hear this. And it s a song that we all have cherished. I mean how many millions of us love the Old Rigged Cross. I put it with Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross which Fanny Crosby wrote.

Listen to the text. Jesus keep me near the cross. There a precious fountain free to all a healing stream flows from Calvary s mountain and the courses in the cross. Be my glory ever till my ransom soul shall find.

Rest beyond the river. Near the cross a trembling soul love and mercy found me. There s a bright and morning star shed his beams around me. Near the cross O Lamb of God bring its scenes before me.

Help me walk from day to day with its shadow over me. Near the cross I ll watch and wait holding trusting ever till I reach the golden strand just beyond the river. And again that chorus is in the cross in the cross. Be my glory ever till my ransom soul shall find. Rest beyond the river. I put this song this what you re about to hear on my CD Songs for the Caregiver.

You can stream it wherever music is streamed or purchased. But I do this for my friend Sam, my mother, myself, my friend Bram, Frank, and so many others who will have an empty chair at Christmas. I know it s painful. I know it s hard. Till my ransom soul shall find.

Rest beyond the river. We will find a portion of rest in this world. We ll find peace that Jesus leaves with us. But our perfect peace awaits us.

Our loved ones have it now if they are found in Christ. But there are many who are grieving and so I play this in honor of Peggy. This is Daniel Fisher and myself recorded live during Communion. You ll hear trays being knocked around. This is The Old Rugged Cross and Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross. This is Peter Rosenberg. We ll see you next time. Thank you.