5 | CEDARVILLE REVIEW FOREWORD EDITOR’S Welcome. You’ve just stepped into the 2021 edition of the Cedarville Review. Perhaps this is the first time you’ve opened this book. Perhaps its cover is still stiff and smooth. Maybe it’s quite the opposite and this copy has been read cover to cover many times. Maybe that cover is creased and its binding is wearing down. Perhaps this is your first time, but you’ve found us in the form of a dear friend’s well-worn copy. That may be the most beautiful option. Regardless, if this is the first read or the fiftieth, I ask this: let the truth of these pieces sing, as it has to the writers and editors alike, and as we hope it sings to everyone who reads them. As you’ve likely noticed, we’ve entitled this year’s edition “Looking for Light.” However, if you keep reading, you’ll find that light isn’t always easy to find. May our awe that the Light sought us out never cease. Nonetheless, there is darkness in these pages. Not all of them will be easy to read. Pages of this book are uncomfortable and difficult, but just as there is darkness in these pages, there is darkness in this world and darkness in myself as I write this foreword. I am not easy to read. I am uncomfortable and difficult. I hope desperately that you also are difficult to look at for too long, uncomfortable reckon with. Dark -- so that I am not alone. These pages are dark because they are real, but interlaced with the darkness is undeniable, unshakable, insurmountable light. He is real, too. He came so that we may not remain in darkness. Many of the words in the following pages will be hard. They were harder to write and harder still to feel and every piece in this book is searching hard for the light to fight the darkness. I would encourage you to do the same. Not every piece will show it to you, but we can’t always see the light in our own moments either. It remains. He remains. I encourage you: don’t stop looking. The biggest disservice we could do to the truth of the journey found in these pages -- to the journey that mirrors those in our own lives -- is to search one part and walk away. Don’t stop after reading the piece that has a nice title, or the piece that your friend wrote, and definitely don’t stop because you were overwhelmed by the darkness. The light is coming. Join us -- the writers, the editors, those who influenced us, and those who showed us light when we couldn’t find it for ourselves -- as we continue our own journeys, as we continue looking for Light in the midst of darkness. Seek and find.
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