The morning light filters through the blinds, soft and golden, but it doesn’t touch the ache that settles in as the headlines scroll across the screen. Some days, the news is too hard to bear.

The screen lights up with a quiet chime. Words blur past as your thumb scrolls. Floods. Fatal crashes. A child gone missing. Each headline a punch to the gut before the coffee even brews.

It’s too much, too early. You try to shake it off, to guard your heart, but then a name catches your eye. A town you’ve driven through. A photo that looks like someone you love. Your stomach drops. You click the link. You whisper their name aloud just to hear it in your voice, hoping it isn’t the same person you used to sit beside in the bleachers.

The sorrow crosses the line between screen and spirit. It doesn’t belong to strangers anymore. It belongs to all of us.

You picture a mother clutching her child’s blanket, still warm with memory. A family standing barefoot in the mud where their house used to be. First responders working through the night, their radios crackling, red and blue lights reflecting in puddles along the roadside. You can almost hear the wails of disbelief, smell the smoke from fire and flood, feel the breathless stillness of a family waiting for a knock at the door.

These are the kinds of days that make you want to retreat. To shut it all out. To go numb. But something deeper stirs instead. Compassion. Prayer. That ache in your chest is not helplessness, it is humanity. And it calls you to do something, even if that something feels small.

While the world spins with sirens and sorrow, your own small corner of it quiets. You light a candle. You check on your people. You send a text. You pause before responding in frustration. You wrap your arms tighter around your children and say “I love you” out loud, just in case. You buy a meal for someone who looks like they’re carrying a load too heavy for one person to bear. You hold the door. You stay a little longer. You offer silence when someone is grieving and a listening ear when the words finally come.

There is something sacred about choosing kindness in the face of pain you cannot fix. When the world feels too broken, sometimes the only thing we can do is hold space for one another. You make room in your day like someone setting an extra place at the table. You let grief breathe, without rushing it toward hope too quickly. You carry what you can. You let love be louder than sorrow.

Tragedy may shake us, but it also invites us to remember what matters most. That life is fragile. That people are precious. That grace lives in the quietest responses.

Because in the end, what we carry together is always lighter than what we carry alone.