Ultimately, it's not what's under the Tree that matters most, but whose hand you're holding...

I've been burying my head in the sand lately... and I gotta get out of the mire.

Hard for me to believe that it's already December! Like, where does the time go?

Though many others have addressed the subject of Christmas, I wanted to pause here and offer my .02 cents, as I reflect upon the emptiness of what my heart feels sometimes about this particular holiday. Perhaps in a world ever-increasing in materialistically consumption in such a crazed society, this inevitably of a matter of time that our country's supposedly most sacrosanct spiritual holiday would fall prey to the perversions of trinkets and time.

Don't get me wrong. I still feel the sunshine of Santa, and I remain ever hopeful our beautiful country can feel this collectively too again. But lately...

Years back, in a conversation with one of my former college roommates, I remarked to him that Christmas should be renamed the "Day of the Gifts", but not the ones that count. He stared at me, and stared me down, saddened.

Hopefully, I am not resounding too negative. Lord knows we have too much of that in our atmospheres now.

But we've got to start having honest conversations if we ever truly desire to reach the shorelines of one another...

Trust is a bridge, and it takes two to get there.

I am not here necessarily referring to some abstract concept of giving of thought and time, for that presumably descends upon someone beyond my pay grade, and can fill your soul with a saintly attitude. I am, however, specifically talking to you about an attitude that we all need to adopt and absorb, an altitude and celestial door that has remained unopened for too long. It's an attitude and adjustment towards the Light of Giving, to deliberately go out of your way, to sacrifice for this is just another word tantamount to say "love".

For kindness is a feeling we all deserve. If I may, if you'll allow, I want to regale a true story and one that still brings me to my knees.

Some time back, I came across a Christmas uplifting story, both wonderfully sad and still simultaneously uplifting. In my hometown Ohio paper, there was an article entitled "Dying teen gifts away all to the living". As I passed over each printed word, the familiar feeling of tears filled my eyes.

Meet a 16 year old girl named April Flemming, a repeat runaway, troubled and tormented, and she is the heroine of this tale.

Imagine back now to when you were just 16 years of breath, full of innocent intentions and hopeful dreams... A time in our lives when the hardest situations that most of us faced were passing our driver's test, growing some facial hair, or perhaps our first kiss. Then, for some of us, we had to swirl up the courage to slow dance with the cutest girl in the gymnasium with a humongous growing pimple gracing our face! Well, maybe that was my experience.

Whatever the case might have been for you, this was not the case for April.

She wasn't thinking about her taste of freedom as a teenager, about boys or college or anything of a timely matter that may have crossed any teenager's horizon.

You see, three years prior she was informed that she had polycythemia bera, a preleukemic disease that in her case ultimately led to cirrhosis of the liver and death.

Nice childhood, right.

Three months before her final Christmas, the doctor's gave her maybe a few months to live. Learning of this conclusion, the Make a Wish Foundation reached out, an entity that grants the dying wishes of children, and when they approached April with a promise to grant whatever she wanted, be it a trip to Disney World or her favorite meal in any city of choice in this world, her dying wish was simply this: "Please give the Christmas presents to the homeless kids."

The Make-A-Wish Foundation President Susan Houk was so touched by April's words, that she replied: "I've never met a child who wanted to give something so touching to another when she was herself grasping for her own life."

Laying in her hospital bed, with her left eye failing, she watched via video hotstreamed, children she would never meet and being gifted with presents.

April softly cried with joy.

And then on a cold, snowless, gray Christmas morning, April Flemming passed away.

With open arms, Heaven accepted one of their own back into the fold. Even through her pain and eventual death, she put the needs of others before her own. She gave a Christmas to 12 homeless children who otherwise would have known nothing but sorrow.

Is there any definition greater of love than that?

With warm, salty tears streaming down my face, I humbly laid down the paper, turned to my dad, got up, hugged him, and quietly thought about this person.

We sometimes forget about the really important things in life. All distracted, we get too swept up in this and that, too creatively busy in our own constructive worlds and lost in the mire of what we think matters. I get that. But then it takes a crisis to crash us back to Earth and realize what truly matters. And then, graciously we are hopefully given a reminder of what matters most to live for, not about receiving gifts, but giving them, most especially gifts from the heart.

For in giving, we not only receive our own salvation, but we also receive in return the greatest gift of all:

Love.

In honor of April and in her name, I am so glad you're here.