Christmas is the most wonderful season of the year, a season full of love, hope and giving.

A season that blesses us all. Or at least, it should be that way, but unfortunately it isn’t always. Sometimes it can be a very difficult season.

I had a very challenging Christmas back in 1992. Joanne was expecting, and this pregnancy was not going well for her. As a result, I was doing almost all the farm work here.

On Dec. 13, early in the morning, Joanne went into labor and had to be flown by helicopter to Minneapolis Children’s Hospital, where she delivered our son, Joshua. He was born weighing only 1 pound 10 ounces. The doctors gave him little chance of living, and they said if he did, he would probably have serious problems the rest of his life.

It didn’t look good at all, actually it looked very hopeless, but with God there is always hope. Joanne and I had been praying for months for Joshua already, so when this happened, we just kept on praying. Don’t limit God; God can do anything. God loves to do the impossible for praying people.

With Joanne in the hospital with our newborn son, I was alone here on the farm. I talked to Joanne late every night on the phone. The question came up, “What do we do for Christmas this year?” After talking it over, we decided we would celebrate it as much as was possible like normal. We decided, though, that this year, I would have to get the Christmas tree from our big woods by myself.

Since I was going from early morning until way late at night just doing all the chores on the farm here, I came up with an idea to save me a lot of time in getting our Christmas tree. I was spreading manure from the barn every day on my cornfield down by the big woods. Earlier that fall, I had noticed a beautiful 9-foot-tall pine tree right on the edge of the woods there.

So a couple days later, I took my handsaw with me, and once I had the manure spread, I stopped and cut the tree down. I had my 560 Farmall tractor, that does not have a cab on it, on the spreader. I got back onto the tractor and decided to drive with my left hand and hold my Christmas tree by the butt upright with my right hand. I guess I was quite a sight driving my tractor through the fields and then up the township road with my Christmas tree towering over me and the tractor.

It was extremely difficult hanging onto that tree when I was going up the township road in road gear. By the time I got home with my tree, I had decided that I would never bring another Christmas tree home that way ever again.

Next, I got the tree into the house and trimmed down to the right size; then I set it up in our living room. Then I got to do something I had never done before in all my life: I got to decorate it. And I enjoyed it. By the time I got it done, it looked pretty nice.

There was something special about that Christmas tree all decorated and lit up in our living room. It was like it was full of hope and life because by it we were once again going to celebrate the birth of a baby boy born many years ago. That baby boy was Jesus, and His parents were going through some very difficult days too.

Joseph couldn’t even get a room for his wife, Mary, to have her baby in. The best he could do for her was a stable with some livestock in it. Then a short while later, they had to leave in the middle of the night and flee to Egypt because King Herod was committed to killing their son. They had very difficult days, but I believe what the angel said to Mary really helped to see them through. “For with God nothing shall be impossible,” Luke 1:37. Joanne and I fully believed that the same God who saw them through would see us through also.

So that Christmas, Joanne, Catherine and I celebrated the birth of our Lord and Savior around our special Christmas tree. And what a joy it was as we trusted Him to see us through our difficult days. Little did we know what lay just ahead in the next couple weeks.

In early January, Catherine started to cock her head sideways a lot. So we took her in to see the doctor – and to make a long story short, we ended up taking her over to Minneapolis Children’s Hospital to have open-heart surgery. They said without it she wouldn’t live much longer. So now Joshua and Catherine were both patients at that hospital, and Joanne was staying there with both of them. I was once again on the farm here by myself. But I really wasn’t by myself; I had Jesus, the one whose birthday we had just celebrated a couple weeks before.

And yes, Joanne and I kept walking in faith, hope and love, believing God would see us through. He saw Mary and Joseph through, so why shouldn’t He see us through our difficult days too? And He did. Catherine came through her open-heart surgery well and has grown into a beautiful young woman. And Joshua is a very strong, hard-working young man today. What can I say? “For with God nothing is impossible.”

God is still in the business of seeing people through difficult days and situations. He gives hope when things look bleak. I’ve found out that sometimes in the darkest days, His light shines the brightest. Because of Christmas, we have an eternal hope no matter what dark days we go through here.  PD

Tom Heck, his wife, Joanne, and their two children own and operate a 35-cow dairy farm in Wisconsin. Contact him by email or order his book via his website.