Making It Through December
December 19, 2025

There’s an old country song by a late singer-songwriter I loved. He sang about December like it was a river you just had to cross. If we can make it through this month, he said, everything will be all right. He never explained how he knew. He just did. December, in his mind, was survival. Endurance. Hold on long enough, and the light comes back.

I’ve lived long enough now to believe those words penned by Merle Haggard. I’ve also lived long enough to see how God often does His deepest work in the months we are just trying to survive.

December has always kept its boots by my door. It comes knocking whether I’m ready or not, carrying memory like a sack of grain—some of it sweet, some of it heavy enough to bend your back. Looking back now, I can see that December has been a place of calling, pruning, loss, and grace in my life.

Fifty-one years ago this month, just after Christmas was in the rearview mirror, I married Benita Beatrice Breeding. December 28, 1974. We were young and sure, the way people are before they understand how much life—and marriage—can ask of them. She walked beside me for decades, through callings and careers, sermons and software, sickness and stubborn hope, bad choices, and God’s remarkable care for us and our family. She left this world on April 12, 2018. Since then, December has carried her memory differently. Each year her name returns to me like it’s written in frost on the window.

Fifty years ago this month, I sat in a room in the student union building at the University of Texas at Arlington, wearing a dress green U.S. Army officer’s uniform, listening for my name. When the university president read, “Jimmie Aaron Kepler has met the requirements for the degree Bachelor of Arts in History,” it felt like a door opening. There wasn’t a December graduation ceremony in those days, so this was mine. My wife and my parents were seated in the room, witnesses to a moment that felt small then, but mattered more than I knew.

That same December day, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army through ROTC. I had done well enough not only to earn a commission, but to be selected for active duty. Orders in hand, bags packed, I reported to Fort Benning, Georgia just after Christmas. December didn’t ask if I was ready; it simply sent me.

Less than a week after those gold bars were pinned on my shoulders, I was assigned twenty-four-hour duty as the staff duty officer for The Infantry School Brigade (now Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade). Over the holidays, I was responsible for soldiers in Infantry Basic and Advanced Officer Leadership Courses, Officer Candidate School, Ranger School, and Airborne School. I learned quickly what responsibility feels like when it outweighs experience. God was faithful. I did the job.

Forty-seven years ago this month, December released me from active duty and pointed me toward graduate school. I traded fatigues for books and found myself asking deeper questions about God, people, and purpose. Being released from career-status active duty so I could attend seminary was nothing short of a miracle. I stayed in the Army Reserves for a few more years, but my calling was becoming clearer.

Forty-five years ago this month, I completed my Master of Religious Education at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary—sixty-nine semester hours in just twenty-three months. Another December marker. Another quiet affirmation of calling. That same month, my first full-time church called me to Decatur, Georgia.

December moved me again forty-three years ago—from Decatur to Bogalusa, Louisiana—as God led me from one church field to another. Looking back, I see how often December marked transition: endings that hurt, beginnings that frightened, and God’s steady presence in both.

In three different Decembers—thirty-two, thirty-one, and thirty years ago—I wrote the cover story for Sunday School Leader magazine. Each assignment arrived during Advent, a season of waiting. I always wrote the article a full year before publication, letting it sit, mature, and change me before it reached anyone else.

Thirty years ago this month, December closed a painful chapter when I resigned my last full-time church position. That decision carried grief and uncertainty. Letting go always does. Yet I have never doubted it was God’s will. In time, God redeemed that season, leading me to turn a long-standing computer hobby into a vocation I never anticipated.

Twenty-six years ago this month, I began what would be my last “day job” at Interstate Batteries. I retired in August 2017 as a senior applications software engineer. Only God could weave ministry, technology, obedience, and provision together that way.

That same December in 1999, I was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa after completing the core curriculum for an associate’s degree in computer science. It was a small affirmation, but a reminder that God honors faithfulness, even when the path is unexpected.

Twelve years ago this month, December delivered news that landed like a stone: my wife was diagnosed with terminal neuroendocrine carcinoid. We learned to live on borrowed time, trusting God one appointment at a time. Cancer didn’t take her then. But cancer is patient. In June 2015, she was diagnosed with melanoma, and that was the illness God used to call her home.

Eleven years ago this month, my mother passed away. I had the honor of officiating her funeral, standing firm when my heart wanted to fold. December teaches you that kind of faith—how to stand in hope while holding grief.

Eight years ago this month, Benita’s melanoma spread to her brain. Surgeons cut. I prayed. God granted us four more months—four months I would give anything to relive.

And still—still—December holds the greatest truth of all. About two thousand years ago, in this same waiting season, God came down quiet and small. A baby born in Bethlehem. No fanfare. No explanations. Just Emmanuel—God with us—light breaking into darkness.

So yes, December is a key month in my life. It’s where joy and grief sit side by side. It’s where God has met me again and again—sometimes in celebration, sometimes in loss, always in faithfulness.

And as I look back over all those Decembers—some filled with celebration, others heavy with loss—I can see a thread running through them all. It isn’t my strength. It isn’t my planning. It certainly isn’t my wisdom. It is God’s faithfulness, steady and sure, even when I didn’t understand what He was doing.

There’s an old verse from Scripture I’ve come to lean on more with every passing year, one I’ve learned not just to quote, but to live:

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
Proverbs 3:5–6 (KJV)

That verse doesn’t promise an easy road. It doesn’t say we’ll understand the turns while we’re taking them. It simply calls us to trust—fully, humbly—and to stop pretending we can figure life out on our own. It asks us to acknowledge God in every season: in joy and grief, in calling and letting go, in beginnings and endings. And it promises that when we do, He will direct our paths.

I’ve learned that when you live that way—when you really trust Him with all your heart—you somehow make it not just through December, but through every month that follows. You make it through weddings and funerals, callings and goodbyes, hospital rooms and quiet mornings when the house feels too empty. You make it through the months that shape you and the ones that break you.

December still comes knocking, boots on, memories in hand. It still asks a lot of me. But it no longer feels like a river I have to cross alone.

And like that old song says, if I can make it through December, I believe—by God’s grace—I’ll be all right.