THE EASTER SEASON provokes a desire in me to find hope and joy again. I don’t want to wallow in misery just because my limited vision can see only a bleak future. Instead, I am choosing to seek hope and joy because I believe that God does indeed empower and guide us. I claim the daily practice of putting my hope in the divine, not our human condition. God seeks our well-being. We must remember this amid the onslaught of trauma brought on by humanity failing to do the right thing.

The post-Easter reflections are more positive in tone. I chose to be optimistic because life goes on, we still have good work to do, and the fight does not end. We still have to care for one another, and we hope that others will care for us. In all of these, I hope that we will find once again the power of prayer and divine love. There are resources we can seek for help, guidance, and support, and I am one of many who have received such generosity and kindness. I invite you to find your own versions of the divine and/or the mystical. The immaterial and unseen surround us, guiding us, especially in our moments of despair and need.

I end my reflection with a prayer for people and nations that are going through turmoil and upheaval. Join me in offering a prayer that we may bring peace wherever we can.

IF YOU WROTE down your past year’s most significant personal joys and losses on a timeline, how might they line up with the liturgical calendar — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, and Ordinary Time? Placing these two calendars side by side, what might you find? Stephanie Duncan Smith digs into these questions in her memoir Even After Everything. For Duncan Smith — and likely for most of us — “Sometimes our personal moments converge with these natural and sacred seasons in profound, meaning-rich ways. And sometimes they clash with unbearable disparity.”

Duncan Smith shares her own story of loss and love with unflinching honesty, even and especially where it seems to clash with the Christian story. The places of dissonance are, for her, both a “dizzying problem” and a “place of divine encounter.” She invites us to dive into the dissonance with her as she wrestles out a sort of reconciliation — a renewed understanding of the Christian story that makes room, so much room, for every human grief. “The promise has never been smooth nor safe passage,” Duncan Smith writes. “The divine promise is presence.”

CLIMATE ACTIVIST, GRANDFATHER, and professional cellist John Mark Rozendaal blocked the entrance to Citibank headquarters this summer to protest one of the globe’s biggest funders of fossil fuel expansion. Hugging a fire-engine red instrument, he played a few bars of Bach and was promptly arrested. “The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind,” he said to the crowd, “to make it susceptible to Divine influences.” His cello bears the inscription: “This machine loves, serves + protects life.”

Small courageous acts of joy are proliferating. In this issue, Rev. Moya Harris quotes rapper Chuck D to confront troublesome forces in this election season and Chris Crawford, a Catholic at Protect Democracy, urges Christians to become poll workers.

While we mourn the passing of civil rights activist, historian, and song leader Bernice Johnson Reagon, we are grateful for associate editor Josina Guess’ celebration of her life. Reagon’s singular voice demanded that we remember our freedom saints, of whom she is now one. Liz Cooledge Jenkins, reflecting on burnout and social activism, reminds us: “Joy, it turns out, is essential to the work of justice.”

A FEW YEARS ago, I set out to knit a baby blanket as an Advent prayer practice. Knitting is incredibly meditative and allows me to pray with focus and clarity. Knitting a baby blanket seems appropriate as the church awaits the arrival of the “newborn king.” I wish I could say I finished the blanket in time for Christmas. I did not. However, even that seems appropriate, as so much remains unresolved for Jesus’ community at his birth. Their political occupation continued, and even Jesus’ birth story reflects the impositions placed upon his family by the Roman Empire. God’s inbreaking happens under serious duress — but it happens nonetheless.

My favorite lines from the poem “Christmas is Waiting to be Born” by Howard Thurman are: “Where fear companions each day’s life, / And Perfect Love seems long delayed. / CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN: / In you, in me, in all [hu]mankind.”

Thurman reminds us that God was born into our sorrow and among those who are brokenhearted and struggling. That truth is so important to hold on to as we process years of our own collective trauma. No matter how unresolved things are, Christmas is born in us, too! In December we continue our journey through Advent and arrive at Christmas. We might not have received what we’re waiting for by that time, and very little may make sense. Yet, because of who God is, we open our hearts to the improbable, trusting that we won’t be put to shame.

I’ve been undoing this cycle for years now, grasping for whatever bits of myself I could salvage and building a whole woman with these fragments, gently weaving them together with truth, with pride, with love, and with hope that I now know. Because for all the ways America has taught me shame and taught me to hide, the people of America have taught me hope. That hope has filled in my gaps.

IN MY FIRST week of design school, I found myself riding Austin’s notoriously limited public transit system, asking fellow riders why they used it, what would encourage them to ride more often, and what they would change about the service.

After a handful of interviews, my rides yielded an unexpected insight: Users didn’t like Capital Metro’s expanded hours and new bus routes. The changes, implemented in June, were ostensibly for the riders’ benefit. But people’s routine included a strong aversion to change. And for a population already dealing with a rapid rate of change in their city, the new routes were especially disorienting.

Any externally forced change can represent an existential threat—as we know all too well from our daily news cycles. Even something as small as the sudden restructuring of our—or our kids’—commute can throw our perceptions of relational, financial, or political safety into jeopardy.

We’re in a wearying time. And looking at CapMetro users’ responses, I began to wonder whether we can build levity into a daily commute as a form of comfort blanket for these users. How can we offer delight as an antidote to people who are really, really weary of change?

Hermits exist in many of the world’s major religious traditions: They are individuals who choose temporary or permanent solitude in remote and isolated locations, such as mountains, caves and deserts. These locations are frequently depicted as sites for revelation and transformation.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. — E.B. White

ON A GORGEOUS FALL DAY, I bundle up just a bit and go sit on the rock under the apple tree in the middle of the field. The low-angled sun pours its subdued warmth onto the splashy orange of the maples, transient yellows of the tamarack, and faithfully green cedar. Further to the west, the mountains cut a postcard-perfect silhouette against the seasonally pale blue sky.

Such grace, warming my heart with joy.

A loving God calls us to experience such profligate joy. Now, in the latter decades of my life, time picks up its pace at an alarming rate. So I often promise myself to seek more opportunities to sit on rocks.

But instead, each morning, the genes of my activist mother, the teachings of my faith, and probably a bit too much of my own hubris conspire to bring on the conflicting desire to “improve” (well, okay ... save) the world.

So I strongly identify with E.B. White’s dilemma, softened by his gentle humor-with-a-touch-of-wistfulness.

Working for social justice seems like forever. I am weary of being tedious to those around me who do not understand my seemingly quixotic campaigns. I am weary listening to the current loud, vicious, largely irrelevant public clamor surrounding issues to which I am dedicated. I am weary knowing that those of us preaching minority positions that were once slammed as unrealistic have been proven right. But it took so long: civil rights, the Vietnam War, apartheid, climate change. As we slogged through our protests and The Powers That Be didn’t listen, lives were lost, billions of dollars spent, time wasted. I am impatient: Why can’t the arc of the moral universe run, rather than just bend, toward justice?

The phrase has captivated my imagination for some time now, as I seek joy in the midst of a world crying out in pain. In a nation of mass shootings and executions, in a world devastated by war crimes and the crime of war, where working for peace means learning the depths and pervasiveness of violence, despair threatens to seep in through the air I breathe. Hope often evades my grasp, and fear like a weight drags down my every movement.

But when I find myself in a morass of bitterness, my soul gets a jolt of energy from my laughing toddler, or the accidentally insightful comment from my precocious 6-year-old, or the warm hand of my husband on my shoulder. I savor the comfort of these gestures and let them lift me out of my cynicism. And as the tears clouding my vision disperse, I remind myself that joy, too, permeates the world and can be found by those with eyes to see it.