May 18, 2026

Today the church is asking what it means to trust God when the answers feel wrong — and whether faith is actually about agreement or submission. Tim Challies puts it without softening: God doesn't ask you to let him off the hook. He asks you to trust him even when you can't. That's a harder thing. The Supreme Court's mifepristone ruling landed this week, and Christianity Today has the analysis — a historic pro-life legal position, reversed. For many believers, this is exactly the kind of moment Challies is writing about. The instinct is to demand an explanation. Faith says something different.

First Things ran a piece on marriage and mortality — the argument being that Christians have quietly dropped the eschatological weight of the marriage covenant until death forces it back. That connects to something O. Alan Noble wrote about AI cheating — not really about shortcuts, he says, but about a failure to love the work, the neighbor, the formation that difficulty produces. TGC's piece on Sabbath runs in the same lane: rest isn't recovery, it's encounter. The thread across all of it is the same one we were watching on March 30 — whether modern Christians want the right things, or whether we've reshaped the faith to want what we already wanted. Meanwhile the relief system serving the world's poorest is collapsing under the weight of the Iran war, per the Times. The church has a word for that. Whether it will speak it is a different question.