For many of us these past months have been full of gray skies and tenuous news. Tumultuous storms—tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, avalanches, and mudslides, just to name a few—have pummeled our landscape. The national and world news, seemingly not much better, has left many of us, like our surroundings, battered and bruised.Tossed by events both personal and global, we feel barely able to discern up from down, and seemingly right from wrong. Everything, feeling more uncertain and unstable than ever before, has left many—even the most stalwart and stoic—stunned in questioning silence.
It has made me think about Daniel, and his friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego. I wonder—as they were trudging in captivity to Babylon—if they might have felt the trepidation of their world being turned upside-down. All that was familiar had been taken away. Did fear ever enter their thinking as they were forced to leave behind what they had known since birth?
