The receptionist asked me to verify my date of birth.

I gave her Gracie’s.

For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.

She glanced down at the chart in her hand and then back at me with a puzzled expression. Before she could say anything, I caught myself.

“Oh … that’s my wife’s birthday.”

After 40 years as a family caregiver through surgeries, appointments, hospital admissions, medications, insurance forms, and enough medical paperwork to clear a small forest, I had automatically answered with the date I have given thousands of times before.

This time, however, I was the patient.I was at the cancer center for imaging and treatment planning in preparation for radiation therapy for prostate cancer. Thanks to routine screenings and excellent physicians, it was caught early. The prognosis is excellent.

Still, it felt strange.

I have spent most of my adult life in hospitals because of someone else. This time, they called my name.

Looking around the waiting room, I realized I was easily the youngest man there. That does not happen to me very often anymore. Later, one staff member told me most of their patients are in their 70s and beyond. Sometimes, they see men in their 60s like me, and every so often someone in his 50s.

For this visit, I was the new kid.

I took a chair off to the side, careful not to intrude on this fraternity of men who seemed to know the ropes. They reminded me of the old men who gathered at Nick’s grocery and gas station near my childhood home in rural South Carolina. As a boy, I would stop in for a soda and candy bar while they held court around the coffee pot, solving problems that ranged from weather and crops to politics and church business.

The subjects changed from day to day. The cadence never did.

Men of a certain age possess a remarkable conversational gift. They can begin with trout streams and end with urologists without anyone noticing where the turn occurred.

RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion

Yuliia Konakhovska/iStock/Getty Images

True to form, this conversation drifted toward prostate cancer, treatments, and the assorted indignities that accompany aging. One fellow described an examination during which the sheet covering him slipped.

Before he could react, the nurse matter-of-factly told him, “Don’t worry. If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll kill it.”

Such is the sort of thing you expect to hear in a cancer clinic in Montana.

The men laughed.

I raised an eyebrow and thought, “How comforting.”

But I still laughed.

Soon enough, they called me back. The technicians positioned my legs, explained the process, and slid me into a machine that looked remarkably like something from an old “Star Trek” episode. If memory serves, it resembled the device that kept Spock alive after somebody stole his brain.

After the instructions were complete, they eased me into position and left the room.

A few minutes later, one of the technicians returned looking slightly sheepish.

“We have a bit of a challenge.”

“Do tell,” I replied.

“There’s a gas bubble.”

The expression on my face evidently communicated that I was not following.

She delicately clarified.

“It’s in … you.”

“Oh.”

I considered several responses, including one with my outstretched index finger that would have made my four brothers proud and the medical staff considerably less appreciative. Fortunately, decades of maturity prevailed.

“What do you recommend?” I asked.

“Maybe take a walk and see if anything happens.”

So there I was, strolling through the halls of a cancer center, trying to solve a problem that five boys growing up under one roof would have regarded as entirely manageable without professional consultation. At times, our household rivaled the campfire scene in “Blazing Saddles.”

The problem was that they had instructed me to drink a substantial amount of water beforehand to achieve the proper imaging. Solving one problem too enthusiastically threatened to create another.

Men over 50 approach certain situations with caution for good reasons.

Eventually, however, everything worked itself out.

Ahem.

The imaging was completed, the planning was finished, and in a few days, I will return to begin treatment.

As I left, I noticed the bell hanging in the hallway. I have seen bells like that before. Patients ring them when treatment ends.

Lord willing, I will ring that bell myself within a month.

RELATED: The song that lets sorrow tell the truth

Sanghwan Kim/iStock/Getty Images

Driving home, I thought about those older men in the waiting room. None of them appeared eager to be there, but neither did they seem intimidated by it.

They knew where to park. They knew where the coffee was. They knew which jokes were worth telling.

In short, they knew the territory.

Eventually, if you stay on any road long enough, you stop asking for directions and start giving them.

One day, perhaps sooner than I would like to admit, I may be the guy telling stories to the new kid who walks through the door — even if the story involves a gas bubble that needed to be walked off.

For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.

Prostate cancer is often called a silent disease.

Mine was.

Fortunately, silent does not have to mean deadly.

​Cancer, Caregiving, Hospitals, Opinion & analysis, Waiting room, Aging, Mortality, Family, Faith, Health care 

The United Kingdom is constitutionally a Christian nation.

Its king, Charles III, is “supreme governor” of the Church of England — England’s established church — and an ordinary member of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Anglican bishops serve as members of the House of Lords, and the Anglican church’s legislation requires parliamentary oversight.

‘If we’re serious about the future of this country, we shouldn’t shy away from that heritage.’

The United Kingdom — whose flag is an amalgam of Christian crosses — is not, however, a majoritively Christian nation.

A Labour Force Survey survey conducted in summer 2025 found that only 44% of adults in Britain identified as Christian, down from 54% in early 2018. The 2025 British Social Attitudes survey found that just 5% of all adults attend a Christian service on a weekly basis.

Elements of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party and Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain have discussed in recent months bolstering or at least maintaining Britain’s Christian identity. If serious about such a project, they might have to consider the matter of Christian representation in top government leadership roles.

RELATED: ‘Beyond evil’: Nightmarish report reveals full scale of mass Islamic rapes of ‘250,000’ white British girls

Richard Baker/In Pictures/Getty Images

The home secretary is the fourth most senior political office in the U.K. government after the prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer, and the foreign secretary. Yet a publicly self-identified Christian has not held the position for nearly a decade.

The current home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is an avowed “practicing Muslim.” Her six immediate predecessors were either non-Christians or individuals who do not appear to have publicly identified as Christian:

Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary who in 2015 chose to affirm allegiance to the Crown rather than swear an oath on a holy book, which Christian Today noted at the time is usually done by nonbelievers;James Cleverly, the current shadow secretary of state for housing, communities, and local government, who identified himself in a parliamentary debate last year as “an atheist” and “a humanist”;Suella Braverman, a practicing Buddhist who served in the post from Sept. 6, 2022 to Oct. 19, 2022, and again from Oct. 25, 2022 to Nov. 13, 2023;Grant Shapps, a Jewish politician who was in the role for only a few days during Liz Truss’ tumultuous final days as prime minister, then later served as secretary of state for defense;Priti Patel, a practicing Hindu from an Indian family who migrated to the U.K. via Uganda, who now serves as shadow secretary of state for foreign, commonwealth, and development affairs; andSajid Javid, the son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants who reportedly referred to himself as a “Muslim Home Secretary” but also claimed “not to practice any religion.”

Blaze News did not receive comment from Cooper or the Home Office.

While the religiosity of Amber Rudd — home secretary from 2016 to 2018 — has not been publicly advertised, there is no mystery about former home secretary and Prime Minister Theresa May’s affiliation. May — in the post from 2010 to 2016 — made clear on multiple occasions that she is a practicing Anglican.

Of the current and past seven chancellors of the exchequer dating back to 2016, two have been self-identified Christians; two hail from Muslim backgrounds; one is a practicing Hindu; and the other two have kept their religiosity out of the public eye.

Of the eight foreign secretaries the U.K. has had dating back to 2016, one — Cleverly — is an avowed atheist; one — Cooper — has signaled she might be a nonbeliever; four — David Lammy, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Jeremy Hunt — have identified as Christians; one — Liz Truss — has said she shares Anglican values but doesn’t practice the faith; and one is an apparent enigma — Dominic Raab, who has a Jewish father, was raised in the Anglican Church, and married a Catholic, has expressed uncertainty about which boxes to check for “diversity questionnaires” with regard to his family.

As for prime ministers going back to 2016, half — Johnson, May, and Cameron — have been Christian, and the other half — Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, and Liz Truss, are, respectively, an atheist, a Hindu; and what statisticians refer to as a none.

The character of these so-called great offices of state have — like the public they represent — tended in recent years not to be Christian in character. The Christian character of the nation is, however, something that politicians right of center have fixated on in recent months despite polling indicating that the public is generally unfussed about the nation’s de-Christianization.

Reform’s Home Affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf said in a February interview with the Times (U.K.) that renewing Britain’s Christian faith was essential to tackling the “crisis of meaning culturally,” especially among young men.

Yusuf emphasized that Christianity was “core to the history and the DNA of the country” and the country was losing its Christian values because of the “sheer quantities of people that came to the country in a short period of time.”

“Regardless of whether somebody is of faith or not, or which faith they follow, I think the Christian heritage of this country is very important, and protecting our heritage and our culture is important. Otherwise the country is not a country; it’s just an economic zone,” added Yusuf.

Danny Kruger, a Reform UK member of Parliament, said months earlier that he would “love us to be a more confidently Christian country that acknowledges its Christian heritage. A society aligned more closely with the teachings of Jesus would be a happier one.”

Reform UK is not the only outfit signaling a keenness to reverse the U.K.’s atrophying Christianity.

Rupert Lowe, leader of the Restore Britain party, stated earlier this year, “Britain is a Christian country, and under a Restore Britain Government — it will remain a Christian country.”

Like Reform’s Yusuf, Lowe has identified mass immigration — particularly from Muslim countries — as a factor driving Britain’s de-Christianization. He has, accordingly, advocated for halting mass immigration and reversing the “islamification of Britain.”

Neither Reform UK nor Restore Britain immediately responded to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

Even the Conservative Party has expressed a need to return to Christianity — if not to the roots then to its fruits.

Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch stated in April, “Britain was built on a foundation of Christian values that have guided our institutions, our laws, and our sense of right and wrong. If we’re serious about the future of this country, we shouldn’t shy away from that heritage, we should be confident enough to embrace, promote, and defend it.”

David Jeffrey of the University of Liverpool published a dashboard last year that provides some sense of how many members of Parliament are Christian on the basis of their public affiliation, their public speech about their affiliation, and what text they swore in on. The dashboard suggests that as of last year, 54.7% of MPs were Christian; 36.4% were nones; 3.9% were Muslims; 2% were Jewish; 1.9% were Sikh; 0.9% were Hindu; and 0.2% were Buddhist.

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​Religion, Christianity, Britain, United kingdom, Rupert lowe, London, Parliament, Faith, Nigel farage, Reform uk, Restore britain, Politics 

Steven Spielberg’s 2026 sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day” about a whistleblower exposing a government cover-up of extraterrestrial life is performing strongly at the box office with over $160 million worldwide to date.

BlazeTV host Rick Burgess has been suspicious about this summer blockbuster since he first saw the previews. Not only is the timing a bit odd in light of the government’s ongoing declassification of UFO-related files, but Spielberg’s own comments about how real disclosure could rattle the faith of many people has Rick’s guard up.

The movie reflects this theory, as many characters wrestle with doubts about God’s divinity and humanity’s place after learning about aliens.

Rick, who argues “aliens” are most likely angels or demons, believes that even if aliens proved to be otherworldly beings, it would not affect believers like Spielberg predicts.

“If it turns out like in the movie that they’re straight up people from somewhere else and they’re not demonic and they’re not angelic, this notion that somehow that’s going to rattle our faith … it’s just not so,” he assures.

True Christians, Rick argues, know that everything is created by God.

“The Scriptures tell us even in Genesis that God is the creator. He is the beginning and the end of all things. If space people show up from another planet or another galaxy, it doesn’t change what we believe about God,” he says.

Believers already know that a great cosmic celestial war between God’s forces of good (angels) and Satan’s forces of evil (demons) rages invisibly all around us.

“So if there’s another bunch from somewhere else, I don’t know what their situation with God may or may not be, but their existence doesn’t equal God doesn’t exist,” says Rick.

But one thing is certain, he says: “What Satan is hoping that we’ll take from this … is that if space people show up, and they’re really something, they must have created us, not God.”

To hear more of Rick’s analysis of Spielberg and “Disclosure Day,” watch the full episode above.

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​Strange encounters, Rick burgess, Steven spielberg, Disclosure, Spiritual warfare