The past year has been rough on our friends. Our friends have lost many loved ones, another one recently received a terminal diagnosis.

When we were in LA, we learned from our community there to pray with great faith and learn to expect the things that were impossible or unseen. To our surprise, we ended up seeing a great number of those prayers come to fruition. Those experiences bolstered our faith and gave us an expectation to believe that the same thing could happen.

But the last year has felt relentless for ourselves and the friends we love, with recurring waves of suffering and loss. I still want to believe in Great Miracles and big dreams, but things have also come to pass that remind us that there are no guarantees, and that in mystery, we are still given the bitter fruits of suffering.

Here we are in Holy Week, and I was reflecting on the same things - that in the period between Good Friday and Easter, our world suffered and mourned the loss of Hope.

I also reflected on how little was in our control - without the initiative of God.

So in my prayers in this season, I reflect on the helplessness of our circumstance, and the great dependence we have on the merciful, mysterious initiative of God. We beg him to act, for in the end what else do we have?