Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Texas this week, something unusual happened at a political convention. Democrats chanted "we're all going to Hell" in solidarity with Senate candidate James Talarico, a former seminarian. What began as a taunt thrown at him became a declaration of belonging, a crowd choosing to stand with the accused rather than the accusers.
Belonging and surrender meet differently in Japan, where pastor Lam Wai Chan arrived from Singapore to find a congregation of barely twenty souls in a nation where fewer than one in one hundred people are Christian. Overwhelmed, he prayed, and felt called not to fix the church, but to release it, to offer it back to God. Sometimes growth begins in the act of letting go.
And long before any of us learned to let go of anything, the Earth itself was being remade by violence. Scientists now tell us our young planet endured a relentless rain of asteroids, a bombardment so fierce that continents could not yet hold their shape. The ground beneath everything we call home was once unformed, molten, waiting.
Perhaps all things worth standing on had to survive their own kind of hell first. That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
