Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Bend, Oregon, a father named Kaylub Giamanco heard children pleading for their lives inside Silver Rail Elementary School, and he moved toward the sound rather than away from it. Three children and a teacher were lost. He stopped the gunman, and still he carries the weight of those he could not reach. There is something ancient and aching in that — the hero who saves and grieves in the same breath.
From grief of a different kind, the comedian Billy Crystal has spoken openly about no longer speaking to God after losing his home and close friends in the California wildfires. Franklin Graham offered a response rooted in faith — that God is real and trustworthy even in ruin. Two men, both certain in their own way, standing at the edge of the same silence, asking different things of it.
And in the quieter corners of the political week, Barack Obama's offhand joke about the White House resembling something between Saddam Hussein and a Cheesecake Factory became, somehow, a referendum on populism, taste, and who gets to laugh at whom. Even Donald Trump declined to take the bait. The joke revealed more than it intended, as jokes so often do.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
