With coffee in hand, I’m seated on the second-floor front deck of the home my family has rented for our annual week together at Edisto Beach. It’s 9:15am and below me the day is beginning as it has the previous four mornings. 

As we walked about the Historic Campus, she confessed to an existence more hellish than holy: fifty-plus years of dysfunctional relationships, brief periods of hopefulness followed by seasons of hopelessness. Unsuccessful efforts to combat the resulting loneliness had given rise to the mounting sense of helplessness that ultimately prompted her Easter appearance.