Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour for reflection.
A mother writes in about her twenty-six-year-old son, an engineer of means who spends everything he earns. He looked honestly at himself and named three struggles: pride, greed, and idolatry of wealth. That kind of self-awareness in a young man is not nothing. It may be the very beginning of healing.
From self-reckoning, we move to something far more wrenching. A woman drove her healthy fifty-five-year-old husband to a Florida hospital in two thousand twenty-one and watched, she says, as the institution quietly stripped away his rights, and then his life. Her story asks us what it means to trust the systems we are told exist to protect us, and whether love alone is ever enough to hold the door open.
And then there is the older, aching question: is America still a nation worthy of blessing? Not a political question, really, but a spiritual one. When we sing those words, what are we actually asking for? Perhaps we are asking not for favor, but for the courage to become something worth favoring.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
