FIRST LIGHT - FAINTLY

An inspired purpose. A noble motto. Etched into arches no longer passed under. Gilded high above the heads of the faithful. The words were worshipped. They were sharp and clean and absolute. And the words never question their appropriateness. We followed them. All of us. Even as the rivers dried and our children collapsed in slow procession.

Even as the air thinned and our companions forgot how to grieve. We were told the journey was sacred. That the suffering is a sign of worth. We admired the pain because it was framed as devotion. Our inheritance. And still the world glittered. We filled our lives with more: more access, more comfort, more proof that we were chosen. We had so much we forgot what it meant to go without. But the dead did not want our stories. They did not care for our loyalty. They left behind no possessions. They leave behind nothing.

Salvation did not speak softly. It arrived in the voice of a child king. An executioner. His convinced destruction was the only pure act left. And then we thanked him for it. We watched and said nothing. After that, came gravity. A spiritual stiffness. A clean, echoless world. A place where nothing reached the heart and the language had been scraped thin.

And then, when we believed everything had gone. we felt her. Not in doctrine. Not in fire. But as a watcher at the end of the earth. She returned without spectacle. No thunder. No flood.

She did not speak answers.
She did not raise the dead.
She simply just stayed with us.