Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Cincinnati, a chapter closes slowly. Brian Tome, the founding pastor of Crossroads Church, has announced he is stepping away from his senior role — this only a month after returning from a suspension tied to an incident involving a horse whip used on a visitor to his office more than a decade ago. Communities of faith, like all communities, must reckon with the distance between the authority we grant and the accountability we require.
From the world of science comes a quieter kind of warning. In nineteen seventy seven, a strain of influenza spread across the globe — later traced not to nature's ordinary chaos, but to an accidental laboratory release, triggered in part by preparations for a pandemic that never arrived. The cure, or the precaution, became the contagion. It is a story about how our defenses, poorly held, can become the very thing we feared.
And in Florida, a thirty one year old pastor named Akeem Moore was shot and killed — a case of mistaken identity, a man who meant harm to someone else entirely. Moore had been called a hero by those who knew him. That word now carries a grief no headline can quite hold.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
