March 24, 2026

Today the conversation is about suffering — what it means, what it does, and whether the church actually believes God works through it. The Gospel Coalition takes the psalms of lament seriously, arguing that groaning is not a failure of faith but the shape of it. Mere Orthodoxy goes further: the refiner's fire is not incidental to redemption. It is the method. Desiring God adds a personal register — Jesus meeting you in the moment, not after it. Three outlets, same pressure point. The question underneath all of it is whether Christians actually trust that suffering forms rather than merely interrupts. That question hasn't gone away — on March 21 Joy Clarkson was already pushing back against a therapeutic Christianity that wants love without cost.

Carl Trueman at Christianity Today pulls the frame wider. His word is desecration — not disappointment, not drift, but something closer to defilement. The body is sacred, he argues, and what the culture is doing to it is not merely wrong. It is a kind of sacrilege. That sits in uncomfortable proximity to O. Alan Noble's piece treating despair as a medical and moral symptom of a world that has lost its account of the human person. Neither is writing about suffering in the abstract. Both are writing about what happens to people who no longer know they are made for something. Reformation21 adds another dimension — the specific, concrete harm done when the church itself becomes a site of dehumanization along racial lines. The thread running through all of it: the image of God is not a background assumption. It is the thing being contested.