July 23, 2026

Today the church is asking a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to encounter God — and what does that encounter demand of you? Jackie Hill Perry told Relevant that proximity to God requires honesty, not performance. That's not a motivational point. It's a claim about what God is actually like. The Aquila Report ran a piece on the incarnation — Jesus as the image of the invisible God — arguing that visibility matters, that God was not content to remain abstract. Desiring God takes the same question to the pew level: what happens when Bible reading feels empty, when the words don't land. Three fixes offered. Which is fine. But the deeper problem they're circling is whether anyone believes the text is the place where God actually shows up.

Mere Orthodoxy says technology is now the dominant frame through which we encounter everything — including, presumably, God. We aren't mastering our tools. They're mastering us. That question of mediation is harder than it looks. Christopher Nolan's Odyssey adaptation is selling out theaters, and Christianity Today asks why — their answer involves longing, homecoming, a hunger for the kind of meaning screens can't manufacture. Reformation21 goes somewhere rawer: chronic pain sufferers don't want your platitudes. They want to be known. That's the same word Perry used. Honesty over performance. Real presence over managed distance. We've been watching this tension build — earlier this week the conversation was about desire and whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. Today the question is whether we're willing to stop performing long enough to find out.