“Suffering” Articles

Lamar’s music is a battlefield of competing theologies embedded in the dissonance of lived experience.

It’s by Christ’s death that we can love our enemies, seek peace with those that want to harm us, and refuse to take vengeance when we are wronged.

Sadness is not the enemy of faithfulness, and the impulse to suppress it may do more harm than the grief itself.

It’s unsurprising that a song about losing what we love speaks to Gen Z, “the anxious generation.”

This series captures the reality that the most difficult parts of life are the most transformative.

We must not allow suffering to obstruct us from having the experiences that make life most worth living.

When this allegorical behemoth lumbers through our lives, we are helpless in the wake of its devastation.

In telling a story about surrender and suffering in the service of hope, Xenoblade Chronicles III invites its players into the practice of sacrifice.

When Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin were killed, when children die around the world of preventable disease, when children and teens experience the “death” of family and get bounced around foster homes, evil is manifest. Suffering has a face. Suddenly questioning God’s plan seems the most reasonable course of action.

How we react to suffering—our own and others’—reveals much about what we truly believe.

Blasphemous reminds us that we too often reduce our mysterious God to a player on both sides of a cosmic chess game.

God wants us to care for the bodies that He has given us, but He also wants us to care for our friends and our families, and to live in community with others. Often, wellness trends have the propensity to drive us away from such community.

If Exodus voices our collective hunger for deliverance, it also calls us to work for deliverance, toward liberatory action.

Wendy Alsup joins this conversation to help us reconcile our current historical moment—which is full of loss and fear—with our tendency to sidestep pain and suffering.

Forgiving God is about disability, except that it’s not. Not really.

In Failing Faith, Wade Bearden invites us into his life so that we might find a faith that can hold up under the weight of real-world realities.