Christmas and Life over Death

by Sharon Rondeau

(Dec. 24, 2024) — On Monday night, actor, musician and philanthropist Gary Sinise appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” guest-hosted by Raymond Arroyo to speak about his son’s legacy following his 5 1/2-year battle with a rare form of cancer known as “chordoma.”

Sinise is well-known for raising as much as $30 million annually through his foundation to help disabled veterans and first responders as well as their surviving family members after a loved one is killed in the line of duty.

Sinise’s wife Moira, too, underwent cancer treatment but is doing well, he told Arroyo. She and his son were diagnosed within months of one another in 2018, he noted.

“Mac,” as Sinise’s son was nicknamed, majored in music composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. A skilled percussionist and later, harmonica-player, Mac composed music for the foundation and a myriad of impromptu songs and other compositions, often while hospitalized in the latter part of his life.

He was 33 when he passed away on January 5 of this year.

As his son’s unfinished music came to life to create a second album posthumously, Sinise wrote on his foundation website, “He was right there with us.”

Titled “Resurrection & Revival” and produced on vinyl, much of the music on the album he had never heard or even known about, Sinise said.

Mac’s story brings to mind that of the late Eva Cassidy, whose own significant impact on the world of music began only after her death on November 2, 1996 of melanoma — at age 33.

In recent years the London Symphony Orchestra recorded orchestrations featuring Eva’s voice in a remastering of her timeless style.

On this Christmas Eve, it is impossible not to remember the One who came to save us from ourselves, to preach love and forgiveness and make sense of it all, was also 33 when He was crucified.

Why are so many of the gifted among us taken early? Why could they not have more time with us? Why do some receive two months on this earth and others 102 years? Why only 33 or 8 years?

Tomorrow, Christmas, is the day Jesus’s birth is celebrated by those who believe. He spent 33 years among us, preaching and performing miracles, was crucified and died for our sins, according to the New Testament.

But it did not end there, for we read He was resurrected three days later.

And He told us, “…I am with you always, until the end of the age.”