Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
Actor KJ Apa, who portrays Jimmy Stewart in the new film Jimmy, speaks of how inhabiting that life changed him. Stewart's faith was not decorative, Apa says, but load-bearing. It held him through war, through doubt, through the long discipline of doing right when no one was watching. Some legacies teach by simply enduring.
From the enduring comes the contested. Scholar N.T. Wright has entered one of scripture's most debated rooms, Romans eleven and its promise that all Israel will be saved. Wright cautions against reading this as a guarantee tied to ethnicity alone, arguing that Paul's vision is wider and stranger than modern certainties tend to allow. The text, he suggests, resists being owned.
And then there is the news that resists easy reflection. Three students at a Christian Bible school in Karen State, Myanmar, were killed when the military struck the campus with air and drone attacks. Six others were wounded. The world's condemnation arrives in words. The students arrived in faith. What we do with that distance between the two is perhaps the most urgent question this hour holds.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
