Healing a hurting humanity starts with a sacred pause, to listen, to learn, to understand, to accept, to forgive, to respect. That sacred pause transcends the fear-driven brutality of the primitive human survival intinct and makes way for a thoughtful, intentional, peaceful, humane response. Peaceful coexistence on this lovely planet is not impossible. It is imperative. Our future, our humanity, our very survival depends on it.

Forgiveness isn't telling someone it was okay to hurt you. It's telling yourself it’s okay to stop hurting. It doesn’t mean you have to trust them again. It means you can learn to trust yourself again. It doesn’t mean you have to give them a free pass back into your life. It means you are free to take your life back again. Forgiveness is simply emptying your past of its power to empty your present of its peace.

When life feels too big to handle, go outside. Everything looks smaller when you're standing under the sky.

Leave a trail of light behind youEverywhere you go. Whose darkness you'll illuminateYou may never know.

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

...and when the world tells you to lower your head and submit in silence to how things are and always will be, lift your voice instead and sing bravely of how things can and should and will be, because that song is why you are here.

The purest worship is to simply love -- to see the image of God in every human; to love them as they are, how they are, who they are -- without demand, without condition, without fear.