Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Nigeria's Middle Belt, fear has taken root in the soil of daily life. A pastor named Reverend Ezekiel Dachomo had already spoken those words aloud before tragedy arrived at his door. Nine members of his family were killed, and the United States has now condemned the violence. His warning, it seems, was also a prophecy.
That grief opens into a larger question one writer is sitting with this week — whether nations, like people, can lose their way so completely that something breaks beneath them. The ancient texts describe patterns, moments when a society's moral foundations quietly erode. No empire, the writer reminds us, has proven permanent. Only something beyond empire has.
And yet into that heaviness comes a quieter image. Rembrandt once etched Jesus leaning toward a Samaritan woman, hand over his heart, crossing every boundary his world had drawn. The artist saw what the theologians sometimes miss — that living water is offered precisely where division runs deepest, and the posture of grace is always one of leaning in.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
