When the Power Comes Back On

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria obliterated Puerto Rico's electrical grid. The entire island — 3.4 million people — went dark. Not for hours. Not for days. For months. Some communities waited nearly a year before a single light flickered back to life.

Residents described the darkness as its own kind of grief. Abuela Marta Reyes, an elderly woman in the mountain town of Utuado, told reporters she would sit on her porch each evening and stare toward San Juan, hoping to see the faintest glow on the horizon. "I just wanted to see light again," she said. "Any light. Just to know someone remembered we were here."

But when the power finally returned — when that first bulb hummed to life in her kitchen — Marta wept. Not because the darkness was over, but because it meant she had not been forgotten.

That is the cry of Psalm 80. A people sitting in the dark, feeding on tears, watching the horizon for any sign that the Shepherd of Israel still knows their name. "Restore us, O God," they plead. "Make your face shine on us, that we may be saved." Three times that refrain rises — desperate, aching, unrelenting.