“Lord, you know all my desires and deepest longings. My tears are liquid words and you can read them all.” (Ps. 35:9 TPT)

With my knees plastered to the ground and my forehead grazing the floor, tears soaked the tattered carpet beneath me. Words weren’t needed. My tears said it all. Why was life so hard? Would things ever change? Overwhelmed, I honestly just wanted to give up.

Then my friends started to pray.

As I stared at my television screen, watching unbelievable chaos before my eyes, I grappled with understanding why such darkness had invaded our school grounds. When I was a teenager, the thought of a mass shooting occurring during chemistry class never crossed my mind. I was worried about passing the periodic table exam not dodging bullets. We had tornado drills not lock-down procedures. How did we get to this place in America?

It doesn’t take an astute observer to realize that there are many things in the world today that are not as they should be. Modern society is like a piece of shattered plexiglass; it’s still intact, but its integrity is compromised. The entire framework of our human reality is filled with cracks and fissures, all of which can and should be fixed by focusing and investing into our vertical relationship with God, which in turn smooths out our horizontal relationships with others.