"Friends, we worship today at the beginning of a new year. And we do so in anxious and uncertain days – days when many voices compete for our allegiance, our attention, and our trust. Knowing this, may we be a community that helps one another notice what we’re swimming in, and gently points one another back to Christ. May we be a community that bears with one another when it’s hard, that forgives when it would be easier to walk away, that sings the songs of Zion together, especially in a foreign place, until they begin to sound more familiar than the noise around us."