When God Moves Into Our Neighborhood

There are moments in history—and in our own private lives—when the world seems to dim around us. Not dramatically, but gradually, as if something has shifted and we are left trying to understand what changed. Unsettling headlines. Institutions straining. The assumptions we once trusted feel uncertain. In such times, people begin looking for a truer horizon, a light that cannot be extinguished by the whims of our culture.

Writers have long tried to describe that search. Thomas Wolfe, in You Can’t Go Home Again, tells of a man returning to the places that formed him only to discover that the past no longer fits the present. “You can’t go back home,” Wolfe writes—not because home has failed, but because time alters the one who returns. The landmarks no longer steady him the way they once did; even the familiar streets feel slightly changed. Beneath his disorientation lies a deeper hunger: a longing for a life that can hold together what has been and what might…