Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
There is something deeply disorienting about a shepherd who feeds on the flock. A recent piece from Crosswalk names what many have quietly sensed — that certain spiritual leaders, hollowed by their own unmet needs, turn the sacred into a site of extraction, taking dignity where they should be offering it.
And yet the shape of memory is strange. Researchers exploring what psychologists call the peak-end rule have found that we do not remember experiences as they actually were — we remember their highest intensity and their final moments. More pain, if it ends gently, can feel like less. What we carry forward is not the whole truth, but a curated impression.
Which brings us, perhaps, to the carpenter's wisdom. A philosopher writing for Psyche suggests that virtue is not always grown by gentle tending. Sometimes warped wood must be bent the other way before it finds its true shape. The road to who we want to become may run, for a time, through the very territory we are trying to leave behind.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
