Brokenness comes from living. Broken lives. Broken hearts. Broken souls. But, if we are lucky, we meet people who help mend the broken places, who discover the lost, who scrape back the dirt and beat back the night. They shine light into the shadows.
In the illuminating rays, healing can begin. Hope can be renewed.
The late great songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote in “Anthem,” “There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Cohen said in an interview that where the light gets into the cracks is where the resurrection and the repentance lives. “It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.”
We recognize that, in the broken world, soldiers sometimes don’t come home and are left in fields far away and that we must confront a dark past of lynching to have a brighter future. UT graduates lead the way in both of those. They also combat the shadows that lead to suicide and fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. They translate the difficult language of medicine into the understandable and native. Surgeons from the UT Health Science Center give of their skills through medical missions but also train doctors and nurses in Honduras, Philippines, Kenya, Zambia and so many more.
In this issue, we celebrate the hope bringers, the night beaters, the light givers.
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