I’m typing this with a hospital bracelet around my wrist. My wife is talking on the phone and our new little boy is asleep on the bed beside her. He is only 26 hours old and I am only 26 years old. Mindy Smith is singing through the little speakers on my laptop. She sings “you’re just a growing beautiful someone.” She sings this for us, kept here blessedly in room 21.

And now the song is over and a new song begins. “When you’re blindsided and deceived, chained to the floor. When it’s difficult to see, riding on the world…” I think of our friends, the Andersons, in another hospital room, not two miles away. They lost their baby on the same day we first held ours. God gives and God takes away.

In church this morning, they cried for the Andersons and they smiled for Ezra and for us. They sang to God as they do every week, whether I am there or not. Sang like baby birds in the nest. Sang the need and the meeting of it. They looked up and their faces were radiant.

Ezra Benjamin. I think it means “help my beloved son.” Amen. Help my beloved son. Help your church. Help our friends now in their loss. Help us all, today and always, until we are brought safely home.