October 30, 2026

Today the church is sitting with grief that has no proper container — and asking whether strength is even the right thing to reach for. The piece that stays with me is from Mere Orthodoxy: a mother writing about miscarriage, about mourning a child who left no grave. No funeral, no burial record, no cultural script. Just loss, and the silence around it. That question — what do we do with suffering that doesn't fit — connects directly to The Aquila Report's treatment of 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul says God's power is perfected in weakness. Not resolved by it. Perfected in it. That's a harder claim than it sounds. On March 24 we were watching a similar tension — whether the church actually believes God works through suffering or just says it does. Today's pieces press the same bruise from two directions at once.

Christianity Today ran something that will not settle easily. A piece on race and justice that doesn't pretend Christians agree — because they don't, and saying otherwise would be dishonest. The disagreement is real, the stakes are real, and the article earns its length by refusing to flatten either side. Relevant Magazine lands nearby with a story about sex trafficking victims being jailed for crimes they were coerced into committing — a justice system that punishes the exploited and protects the exploiters. That's not a complicated moral question. It's a clear one the church has been slow to answer. Desiring God argues this week that worldliness — loving the world more than God — is quietly corrosive, a spiritual drift more than a sudden fall. And Mere Orthodoxy pushes back on the re-enchantment trend: the longing for mystery and magic that's drawing some Christians toward frameworks that feel spiritual but aren't tethered to the Gospel. The week's pieces don't share a single answer. They share a single pressure: what do you love, what do you mourn, and who do you show up for?