Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Lexington, Kentucky, an eighty-two-year-old pastor named Jerry Gumm has now carried the weight of a full year — a year since his wife and daughter were murdered inside his own church, and since bullets tore through his own body. He is still there. Still preaching. There is something in that kind of faithfulness that resists easy explanation, something that asks us to sit with it rather than rush past it.
From endurance, we turn to a quieter kind of injustice. Pakistan's Supreme Court has overturned the death sentences of three men convicted in the two thousand fourteen killing of a Christian couple burned alive, falsely accused of blasphemy. Shahzad and Shama Masih were killed by a mob. That their killers now walk free is a wound that many in the global Christian community will carry quietly, and not so quietly.
And then there is this — paleontologists tell us that baby tyrannosaurs, no larger than a house cat, hatched in great numbers, fierce and already toothed, already hungry. It is a strange comfort somehow, that even the most fearsome creatures begin small, begin fragile, begin surrounded by siblings in a world that does not yet know their name.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
