Years have ghosted their quarter century into the past, our brokenness healed only by an impatient future pleading to us through the voices of our children. Time still aches with losses hard to set aside, its great yawn of shadows stretched behind us in an unforgiving dark that stutters the way ahead. Yet I will take your seven hundred days of failure for a single one of hope, when the imperfections of our past can melt into the cracks of our repair like a kintsugi kiss. Then, from the fragments of our differences will grow a kind of beauty of its own, bound fast by faith and trust, and finally blessed with the promise of a lasting peace.