Welcome to this celebration of Christmas Day. I want to begin with a story. It’s not a Christmas story. But it involves an incident that occurred on the day after Christmas 2004.

One day last December, seventeen-year-old Max Loeb was home from school. He had been suspended that day for some reason, nothing serious. His family, though, is grateful that this one time Max got in trouble. Why? Because that particular day his father also happened to be home, and his father, Hamilton Loeb, suffered a massive heart attack. Max performed CPR on his father, keeping him alive until paramedics arrived.

At the hospital, doctors discovered that Hamilton Loeb was suffering from a viral infection in his heart. After repeated heart attacks, the doctors decided to put him in a deep-freeze coma in order t…