A cool Antigua wind breathes into the white tent where we are gathered to worship, to seek His face, and to find fresh strength together. From all over the world, we are one.

“Quiero vivir cerca de Ti

que sea real el cielo en mi”

Again, we stare at the screen in disbelief. Hooked up to our individual devices, still we are one in the grief. At our bagel bar this morning, my man and I don’t say much, as the CNN live stream in the corner continually bleeds over all of us this latest tragedy. A bearded man with a weary face enters with a laptop under his arm, and just says one word to the weathered waitress: “Orlando!” She shakes her head and brings him coffee.

Rays of sunshine finds you pressed into the shadows of familiar fears. The unexpected light makes you close your eyes, the warmth relaxes your tense face. I watch the tight armor loosen its grip on your vigilant muscles.

Maybe you are single, and as the dreaded day approaches, you just want to escape from the glossy pink and red advertisements everywhere that shove in your face that you are “missing out.”

Heavy and icky, a sense of doom presses down on me. At night, it jerks me from my sleep with scenes from what-if scenarios raising my pulse as efficiently as any horror move while endless do-do lists scroll like credits in the background.

If 2014 treated you harshly, you are not alone. So many solid, sincere souls echo the shared lamentation: This year was rough! Not just “I’m exhausted/disappointed/stressed out” rough – no, this was the kind of wicked, whipping torment more akin to a hurricane relentlessly pounding on people already shipwrecked, just barely holding on to the remnants of their man-made security for sheer survival.

The roofers came! After sixteen years of dreading the tropical downpours that relentlessly revealed new leaks, I can barely believe it will actually end. As if to emphasize the forces we’re up against, our rescuers were only able work the first day of the first week because, refusing to acknowledge the calendar’s dry season, pounding rains impeded reparation’s progress.

I have struggled with modern Christmas. If I don’t watch it, I turn into the Grinch, cynical at all the commercialism and stressing obligations. But my frustration with the neon light replacing the true Light only turns my own heart dark.

In retrospect, it was impatience and discontentment mixed with illusions of an easy income that drove us into the business that became our nightmare. Then a young pastor of a fragile church plant and new father, my man sought the solution to our struggle for sufficient time and money for both, in what appeared to have worked for others.

No pain pierces me more than that of watching helplessly when a loved one is in agony like an unprotected nerve, it sends jolts of sharp shocks through my system, and everything inside me is in that primal, raw state of I must act! I must stop this. Now!

Then she arose with her daughters- in- law that she might return from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the Lord had visited His people by giving them bread. Therefore she went out from the place where she was, and her two daughters- in- law with her; and they went on the way to return to the land of Judah.