God—We’d like to have had a Hallmark

God—We’d like to have had a Hallmark card kind of week: gentle, quiet and serene, but it’s been anything but that. People died this week—and families and friends grieve. A man got bad news about cancer. A single mother can’t both pay the rent and feed her kids. A child overheard her parents fighting, and she cried herself to sleep last night.

A young person has felt the [holiday lights go dim], overwhelmed by the darkness of depression and discouragement. Words were spoken that injured, acts were done to hurt, and relationships suffered as a result—some maybe irreparably. We may have…