LightWorks

Our children are our greatest resource, the hope of the world, the next generation. When we are "too busy" to explain a point of faith or theology, or are afraid they will find it "too boring," we are risking nothing less than the work and witness of all the saints who have gone before us.

When a star explodes in a distant galaxy, we don't hear it. We don't feel it. We don't even see it for thousands and thousands of years. The great distance of the star means that even though the brilliance of the explosion travels at the speed of light (180,000 miles/second), it takes generations to reach even our most powerful telescopes. Only when the light finally reaches us can we acknowledge that distant star's explosive beauty. Without the continuity of the light, tirelessly, steadily traveling towards us for millennia, we might never know that it had existed at all.

Communities of faith must be able to produce light with the same intensity, tenacity and brilliance of that distant star - light that can be trusted to stay so true to its trajectory that the image it conveys is a vital, vibrant, distortion-free representation to generation after generation of the original faith community.

It was Benjamin Franklin's least known, but perhaps most important political insights:...