Welcome to The Light.
In Philadelphia this past Sunday, gospel singer Kirk Franklin found himself restrained by security after a street preacher told him and his wife they were bound for hell. It is a strange and tender irony — a man who has spent his life singing about grace, confronted by someone wielding judgment as a weapon. Faith, it seems, can be armor or invitation, and rarely both at once.
That tension finds a quieter echo in pastor Judah Smith's reflection on his friendship with Justin Bieber. Smith confesses that Bieber taught him more about God than he ever taught the singer, because extraordinary public pressure, he says, produces an acute and honest kind of faith. There is something worth sitting with there — the idea that the student sometimes carries the deeper wound, and therefore the deeper knowing.
Meanwhile, Texas has become the first state to require Bible passages on a reading list for more than five million public school children, drawing sharp objection from secular advocates who see the boundary between faith and civic education quietly dissolving. How a society decides what its children should encounter — and why — says everything about what it believes meaning is for.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
