Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton stood before the Faith and Freedom Coalition this weekend and spoke of deliverance — not in the political sense, but the ancient one. He told the gathered crowd that God had carried him through years of legal battles, and that the Bible, he said, is full of exactly those stories. There is something worth sitting with in that framing — the idea that personal trial finds its meaning inside a much older narrative.
From one kind of confinement to another — a Cuban teenager, son of two Protestant pastors, has been released after spending more than three months inside a maximum-security adult prison. He came home, but not freely. The terms of his release forbid him from speaking publicly in person, a silence imposed by the state on a young life still forming its voice.
And then there is Sheila Hicks, ninety-two years old and still creating. She carries with her Georgia O'Keeffe's quiet conviction — that art exists to reach toward the unknown, and to keep it always just beyond reach. In an age that prefers to measure and market what it already understands, her vitality feels like a kind of gentle resistance.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
