Even when the dark comes crashing through, when you need a friend to carry you and when you’re broken on the ground – you will be found. So let the sun come streaming in, ’cause you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again. Lift your head and look around – you will be found…

Benj Pasek & Justin Paul

January is traditionally a difficult month for me. It is the final month of what I’ve lovingly dubbed “anniversary season” – the remembrance of all the death days of my family every year. The season runs from the beginning of September until the final day in early February. The day I lost my grandmother who helped raise me. And January is that month when all the emotions usually come crashing down.

Lord knows that this year has added some more beloved ones to the cloud of witnesses watching over our brood from up above. On some level it would seem that this year should probably be one of the hardest in recent memory. Yet somehow… it’s not.

I am not entirely certain why or how, but for some reason this January I find myself full of something I have not felt with this strength in a great long while: hope.

Hope to get me through today. Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope that the future is indeed shining bright upon the horizon.

Perhaps it is all the heroes, including within my own family, that are now fighting for us from the other side, but at some point my heart started to believe again. Believing that all of us will be found. All of us will find and become who we are meant to be.

This is not to say that there will not be a fight ahead of us. This is not to say that there will not be hard days filled with sighs too deep for words. Real life still hurts. This world still has many battles that need won so that all God’s children may find themselves safe and flourishing as God desires.

Nevertheless, there is hope. A new day is dawning, no matter how many may try relentlessly to stop it. Heroes on both sides of the veil now do all they can to see it safely arrive.

More than anything else , now more than ever, all of us need to work for one another. To find one another. To walk with one another as we tread the path ahead. Because that is the source of our hope – God’s gift of one another.

Ultimately it reminds us of the most important thing: we are never alone.

And if we remember that, we can do anything.