I find, in this season of my life, dark-hued as it is even on a sunny day like today, that I must wrestle with the words of Flannery O'Connor, who was herself no stranger to suffering: "People think Christianity is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke similarly when he said the whole of Christian discipleship was learning how to die. So I find myself dying daily to a conception of myself as self-sufficient, and find myself more and more a vacuole of need. The problem, of course, is that even in the need I feel right now I do not turn to Christ as the sole source of satisfaction. I don't even know what that would look like for me. Instead, I find myself looking to other people as if they could save me from myself, as if they could draw me...