Book excerpt: It's so easy to get bogged down in this world -- to feel the weight of ugliness, hate, destruction, emptiness, and depression pushing down on us. If you're not careful, life will try its best to crush you. But something gentle exists outside of it, under the coarse fabric of things. There is a soft voice waiting for you to listen and hear. And it's so easy to drown it out, to overlook it, to pretend it doesn't exist, or simply not hear it through the noise.Jesus is the whisper in the chaos. Our contributors see Him in the peripheral, call out to Him from the dark places and wait for His voice, feel the peace in His gentle light, or recognize the weight of His absence in an absurd, seemingly meaningless world.In this issue, you'll find laughter and despair, the everyday moments and the sublime, brokenness and healing, pain and joy, and in everything, bubbling underneath the surface, Jesus -- waiting, whispering, and placing His finger on everything.