Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
There is a quiet cultural movement growing around the idea of being alone — not loneliness as wound, but solitude as choice. They are calling it solo maxxing, and its appeal is real. But pastor Wayne Francis gently pushes back, asking us to open our calendars and ask honestly whether we have made room for the people who need us present, not just available.
That question of presence carries into the pulpit as well. The Gospel Coalition recently gathered pastoral voices around the discipline of preparing a preaching calendar — a practice rooted in the belief that a congregation deserves a shepherd who has thought ahead, who has sat long with Scripture before Sunday arrives, who plans not from anxiety but from love.
And then there is Jessica Simpson, whose story has lived so long in headlines that distorted it. Her voice now appears on a new for KING and COUNTRY song called my mosaic, drawn from her two thousand twenty three experience of being, as she describes it, born again in Tennessee — a quiet, personal turning that no tabloid could have anticipated or contained.
Three lives, three forms of showing up. That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
