St Nicholas: The Hidden Fire of Charity

St Nicholas: The Hidden Fire of Charity
What the real man behind “Santa Claus” teaches us about courage, sacrifice, and becoming fully alive in Christ.
In these modern times the world remembers St Nicholas with sleigh bells, red coats, and commercial cheer. He is a jolly figure, increasingly representing little more to the secular culture than a few days in the year for over-indulgence and frenzied consumerism. But behind that soft cultural silhouette stands a man of astonishing spiritual intensity. He was a bishop whose life reveals what love looks like when it becomes courageous, creative, and utterly unafraid. If we allow him, Nicholas can reawaken in us a Christianity that burns rather than blinks.
Nicholas was orphaned very young, a detail often mentioned only in passing. Yet it shaped everything that came after. Out of the grief of early loss grew an extraordinary tenderness toward anyone who suffered. He inherited wealth, and instead of holding it tightly as security in a world …