We live today in a world short on hope and amply supplied with despair. For most, the daily news isn’t good. We are all looking for hope in the midst of the chaos—hope for life to go back to normal.

It’s a scary thing to be in a state of open war; it’s unsettling to think that you might be under attack but quite unaware of what’s taking place. It’s no secret that warfare today is undergoing rapid change. There are still live fronts with soldiers and military hardware in many places. But there is a whole new aspect to it: the silent, the covert, the electronic.

The city of Detroit has undergone a major transformation that some have called “the big comeback” or a “rebirth”. Just a few years ago, the Motor City filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, saddled with more than $18 billion in debt. Buildings like the once-grand neoclassical Michigan Central Station—a building that symbolized Detroit’s significance—had been abandoned and littered with graffiti, symbolizing the decline of the city.

In general, humans do not like to talk about death. As a society, we have “sanitized” the process of dying by keeping it largely out of view. But the pandemic brought the topic of death into sharper focus. This raises some important questions: What happens to believers when they die? Will we see our departed fellow believers again one day? 

If the experience of the coronavirus pandemic taught us anything, it taught us patience. So many things were put on hold. Plans for vacation or plans for visiting loved ones were paused. We waited for restrictions to be lifted as we longed for society to return to “normal.” Patience is not something that comes easily to us—and for some of us, being patient is a major challenge.