A sad story hit the wires this week. One of those stories that pulls at our heart strings. It seems that a Tennessee man who plays Santa Claus at about 80 events a year was called by an ICU nurse to come to the bedside of a terminally ill boy.<\/p>\n
When Santa arrived the boy\u2019s mother gave him a toy to give to the dying boy. Santa went into the room and sat on the boy\u2019s bed and told him, \u201cSay, what\u2019s this I hear you\u2019re gonna miss Christmas? There\u2019s no way you can miss Christmas! Why, you\u2019re my number one elf!\u201d<\/p>\n
The boy asked Santa, \u201cThey say I\u2019m gonna die. How can I tell when I get where I\u2019m going?\u201d<\/p>\n
Santa responded by telling the boy to tell them that he is Santa\u2019s number one elf and they\u2019ll let you in.<\/p>\n
The boy gave Santa one last hug, asked Santa to \u201chelp him\u201d and passed from this life.<\/p>\n
I told you it was a sad story, didn\u2019t I? It greatly saddens me\u2026 but, maybe, not the same way it saddens you. It saddens me that a mother and a nurse, who deals with death on a regular basis, would pick up the phone and call an actor in a red suit to give a precious soul some false hope at the very end of his life.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust tell them that you\u2019re my number one elf and they\u2019ll let you in,\u201d he was told.<\/p>\n
What saddens and angers me most is that a boy cried out for help from adults who were supposed to help him and all he got was a fairy tale. Neither a mom, a nurse, nor Santa had the words that could make a transition like that a hopeful one. Instead of telling the boy to relate to \u201cthem\u201d that he was a number one elf, where was the voice that could use the same number of words (or less) to tell a soul hanging on to life by a thread, \u201cBelieve on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The hijacking of Christmas isn\u2019t really a game when you look at it from this angle, now is it? The baby that was laid in a manger 2000 years ago is the only savior this world will ever have. Now, that\u2019s a message of hope, an inspiring story to shout about. Jesus Saves!<\/p>\n
Pastor Bret<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A sad story hit the wires this week. One of those stories that pulls at our heart strings. It seems that a Tennessee man who plays Santa Claus at about 80 events a year was called by an ICU nurse to come to the bedside of a terminally ill boy. When Santa arrived the boy\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sunday-bulletin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7z8g1-4R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salemsayers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}