Welcome to The Light, where we pause together in the quiet between the noise.
Seneca wrote that we suffer more in imagination than in reality, and there is something tender in that observation — the mind constructing catastrophes that never arrive, exhausting itself on futures that dissolve before they do. Anxiety, it seems, has always been the tax we pay for consciousness.
And yet consciousness reaches toward something. A student at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Georgia, was found dead inside a campus apartment this week, and the community there is grieving in the way communities do — slowly, collectively, searching for words that are never quite enough. A young life, a quiet Sunday, and the particular weight of loss that settles on a place.
Elsewhere in the conversation between faith and the world, a Texas congregation has drawn both attention and controversy for sheltering an undocumented immigrant, calling itself a sanctuary church. Senate candidate James Talarico counts it as his longtime parish. His opponent calls it harboring. The congregation calls it faithfulness. The distance between those two readings tells us something about where we are.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
