EDITORIAL
Sweet in Sad

Perhaps I am too swayed by unease about the current state of the world, some of which is conveyed in my Kingsview column, but this seems to me a particularly tumultuous issue of DreamSeeker Magazine. There is much storminess in it, from the story of his father’s suicide told by recent high school graduate Joe Franzen, through the account of the living Alzheimer’s death Elizabeth Raid’s father is suffering, to the haunting meditations on life and aging Barbara Shisler offers in her poetry.

That is not the end of it. Jack Orr and Luanne Austin, each in unique but overlapping ways, tell of journeys away from or toward the church, of times when the church seemed stale or dead. Meanwhile Dan Hertzler, reviewing books on the environment, takes on the pain of the entire planet, and I find myself echoing him in my column. Then in ways smaller in scale though not significance, Valerie Weaver-Zercher addresses the cultural winds ceaselessly telling parents to make of their children more and more and more.

But if there is much trouble to face and sorrow to experience, how much faith shines also in these autumnal pages. Franzen finds hope within his loss. Joan K. King’s comments on the power of congregational singing dovetail with Orr’s testimony to the power of hymns to bring him home even as Austin’s entire article seems ultimately to become a hymn of faith in the God who “is.” Gregory Hartzler-Miller tells vividly of how in a dream he met “a man in Christ.” Dave Greiser’s review of “Signs” reminds us that even in the secular media some are exploring questions of faith. And Noel King’s bemused inability to grasp the power of blinking punctures all the seriousness before it gets too far out of hand.

As editor I never fully know in advance what shape a particular issue will take. Sometimes promised writing misses the deadline and falls back to another issue. Sometimes a gem shows up just before deadline, then, though slipping in at the last minute, transforms the entire feel of an issue.

This time, as I worked article by article, I felt blessed by many unexpected flashes of grace. Then toward the end I felt goose bumps as I saw it all falling together. What stirred the tingling was, precisely, salvation juxtaposed with suffering, sunshine with shadow, being lifted up with falling low. Sometimes the testimonies are in faith language, sometimes less so, but rarely, at least as I see it, does a writer miss the mark, because no contributor fails in some way to see light within dark, sweet within sad.

That seems also often the shape of our planet this autumn, filled with so much storm yet so much also to be held dear. No one can know precisely what world these articles may be traveling through in coming months, but let them in some way fit with what is to come, and testify implicitly or explicitly of the one about whom it is said that the light shines in the darkness.
—Michael A. King