Birth and Death are Life Issues

Staff Editor

A note from CT’s editorial director of features in our March/April issue.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

For everything there is a season,” the Teacher tells us in Ecclesiastes. “A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecc. 3:1–2, ESV).

I remember the morning I found out I was pregnant with my eldest son. Shortly after breaking the exciting (and surprising!) news to my husband, I took our dog for a walk. In that moment of quiet, one of my first thoughts was Lord willing, this child will outlive me. The reality of death became personal.

In the stories we tell and the legacies we bequeath, birth and death are always intertwined. And in this issue of Christianity Today, we examine both the beginnings and the endings of lives lived toward God.

Karen Swallow Prior describes how childlessness can be a blessing: “Sometimes, while we are looking for one gift, it can be harder to see another one resting, still wrapped, in the other direction.” In conversation with Prior is Kara Bettis Carvalho’s report on fertility and reproductive technologies. And as the internet laments the struggles of parenting, Kate Lucky reminds us of the joy of motherhood.

These are not merely women’s concerns or personal ones. As we consider demographic cliffs, declining birthrates, and the importance of passing the faith to subsequent generations, these stories speak to all of us as we promote the common good and make disciples.

Likewise, we must think Christianly about death—not as a merely natural phenomenon but as a spiritual reality, an entrance into eternal life. Just as we fight for the lives of the unborn, we must also fight for the lives of those close to death, opposing all forms of euthanasia even when they’re branded as “compassionate” or “dignified.” To that end, Kristy Etheridge reports on Catholic and evangelical responses to physician-assisted suicide in Canada and New York.

In between birth and death, the church works toward human flourishing and restoration. You’ll see evidence of this in Emily Belz’s feature about Christian boarding houses and Andy Olsen’s reporting on churches advocating for those wrongly detained. In our new Dispatches section, several CT staffers highlight Christians laboring to redeem business opportunities and rejuvenate a beleaguered city.

In our reporting, reviews, and personal essays, we always take the side of life, including in this Lenten and Easter season. (We’re honored to feature an interview with theologian Fleming Rutledge about the Crucifixion and Resurrection.) We serve a Savior who passed through death, bearing the weight of sin and purchasing our redemption. Victorious, Jesus ushered in real life, and in so doing declared—as poet John Donne wrote—“Death, thou shalt die.”

Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Editor's Note".

- More from Ashley Hales

Ideas

The Birds and the Bees, Babies and Me

Karen Swallow Prior

God calls us to a fruitful life, no matter our fertility.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

I spent a lot of time thinking about the birds and the bees while growing up. I was raised in a rural community as the child and grandchild of farmers. I helped oversee the births of kittens, chickens, rabbits, and one horse. Later, as a college student, I worked at a farm that bred and trained show horses. At times, I was called on to assist in the breeding of mares, the collection of semen from stallions for use in artificial insemination, and the castration of colts. On the farm, we had no doubts about how and when a new life began because we spent so much time trying to facilitate, manage, and control it. The facts of life were all around us every day.

The barn housed one stallion, a stunning steel-gray Arabian. He’d been brought to the farm with hopes he’d sire more progeny from his coveted lineage, but alas, he turned out to be sterile. He didn’t know it though, and whenever a mare was led past his stall, he’d prance about with flared nostrils, arched neck, and flourishing tail. As his past and present owners battled out their legal and financial claims, his fate remained in limbo. Once, I got to exercise him by galloping through the wooded trails that wound around the outskirts of the farm. It was the most exhilarating ride of my life. Like most stallions, he had to be turned out alone and housed in a stall set apart lest he be constantly worked up by the other horses. His was a lonely life.

Like other animals, human beings are subject to nature’s laws. In the realm of mere nature, reproduction is a biological, mechanical, and utilitarian affair. Yet when it comes to human reproduction, so much more than science, biology, and nature are involved. Being made in God’s own likeness and image, humans are more than natural beings. To bear or not to bear a child is a matter that touches on all that it means to be human: not just our biology but also our personal desires, drives, hopes, expectations, and fears—all these wrapped up in our social and familial contexts, traditions, and assumptions.

Being childless has forced me to examine these things.

The thought of not having children, of not being able to have children, had never occurred to me. People in my family tended to marry and have babies early. Not always in that order. I assumed when I married at age 19 that babies would come not long after. They didn’t. But I was still young and not worried. I had so much life ahead. I embraced fully what was already in front of me: marriage, school, work, and a thriving church life.

Year after year passed, however, and I didn’t get pregnant. Then one day, I woke up in the surgical room of my gynecologist after a procedure that discovered and (ostensibly) repaired the damage done to my body by previously undiagnosed endometriosis.

“You’ll be pregnant within six months,” the doctor said confidently.

Except I wasn’t. Not six months later, not one year later. Not, as far as I know, ever.

The doctor also mentioned that the next step would be to take fertility drugs. He said it as though he were a waiter in a fine restaurant describing the next course as he cleared the current dishes away. I nodded dumbly, got dressed, and shuffled woozily to the waiting room to find my husband. Because it had taken longer than expected for me to awaken from the anesthesia, we were the last patients to leave. As we exited the building, I was surprised to find it was already dark outside.

This was the ’90s. Tabloid headlines regularly blasted harrowing but triumphant stories of multiple births resulting from fertility treatments. Afternoon talk shows featured beaming young parents seated on plush couches next to six, seven, or eight infants or toddlers adorned in matching bow ties and ribbons. But beneath the shiny surfaces emerged stories of months of bed rest for imperiled mothers, pregnancy “reductions,” and fragile babies spending weeks or months in intensive care units. At the same time, breakthroughs with in vitro fertilization raised a little (but not much) public debate about the ethics of intentionally creating embryos fated for medical waste bins or perpetual storage in freezers.

It seemed there were more regulations and safeguards around breeding horses than in making God’s image bearers.

The blessing of medical science had healed my diseased body, as far as we could determine. That was enough. My husband and I decided that intentionally undertaking such grave medical and ethical risks was, for us, too close to testing God. We declined further fertility treatments of any kind, leaving it in God’s hands. And to wild abandon in the marital bed.

Still, no babies came.

I didn’t have many role models for faithful, happy, childless marriages. I have vague memories from my childhood of an elderly couple, distant relatives, who lived in an old brick house in Vermont where a clear, stony brook gurgled in the back. They were kind hosts who let me ramble throughout the place, full of rooms with no other children to be found. There was a sense of something mysterious about them and their home—something about the abundance of a life that doesn’t look like everyone else’s—that lingers with me still.

Most of the married women my age in church had or were having children, so I didn’t find childless role models there. Nor did I reveal my fertility struggles with my church or even my family. These were things few talked about then, and if the internet existed at that time, I didn’t know about it. I certainly didn’t want pressure, or sympathy, or advice. Most people assumed, I think, that I was tied up with my academic pursuits and didn’t want children at the time or perhaps ever. If they were making that assumption, it was fine with me.

Later, into my 30s and 40s, as such subjects were increasingly becoming topics of public conversation, much of what was expressed—by childless women more than childless men—displayed a level of existential longing, struggle, and despair that I did not share. Because I was not striving to be pregnant, I felt my loss was less. I resonate with words I recently read from the late Elizabeth Felicetti. In Unexpected Abundance: The Fruitful Lives of Women Without Children, Felicetti mentions that since she had no diagnosis for her infertility, she had no cause to turn to reproductive technologies. As a result, she says, “I sometimes felt like I could not express my own sadness about children because I had not gone to such lengths.”

Being in the minority is, by its very nature, hard. Procreation reflects the natural order and is the pattern fulfilled by most creatures and most people. It is the way of the birds and the bees. But not me.

The hardness of not having the children I hoped and dreamed I would have has brought various kinds of grief. Chief among them is knowing what a great father my husband would have been and wanted to be. Smaller sadnesses include how I missed being able to read to my children the stories I loved when I was a child. To hear a child’s delighted squeals when playing with a puppy. To watch a small being grow into the unique person whom God made her to be and whom I had a part in forming. To experience my own children having children.

But great blessings have come, too, blessings that a path with children would likely have turned toward the home rather than outside it. My husband has been a teacher—more than a teacher, a father figure—to the teens he teaches in school. Likewise, I have been, for a small number of my own students, a mother figure—to some (they tell me) the mother they never had. I have written books that have helped others love the stories I love. I have cared for many of the lesser creatures God created and called good. I have been able to give back to my parents in their last years a fraction of all they gave me, by housing them, caring for them, and being their companion and helper—more so, to be sure, because I did not have children to care for as well. In the “sandwich” generation—those caring for two generations, those before them and those after them—I am an open-faced kind.

This openness is a gift. Childlessness can be a calling in the same way that being a parent is a calling, or as marriage or celibacy can be callings. Not to be called to something is inherently to be called to something else, even if that something else is elusive for a while.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

Writing about celibacy—another way of life outside the ordinary course for most people—Wesley Hill observes in his essay “Celibacy Is Not the Gospel” that celibacy can “witness to the coming new creation in which ‘they neither marry nor are given in marriage’ (Matthew 22:30; 19:12),” just as marriage can “point to the coming wedding supper of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31–32; Revelation 19:6–8).”

Similarly, while having children is the primary way to fulfill the creation mandate given in Genesis 1:28 and 2:15, those who do not have children can also “be fruitful and multiply” (ESV) in other service to God’s people. Just as marriage points to the mystical union of Christ and his church, so too children point to a fruitfulness of our spiritual lives that is born of life in Christ.

In her book Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling, Anna Broadway relays the words of Joanna, a celibate Catholic, who describes her call as one not to singleness or celibacy but rather to a life in community. “Through that shared religious life, she’s bonded with people she didn’t choose,” Broadway writes. Joanna explains, “They are given to me. And I learn to love them.” Similarly, in childlessness, God brings people other than our own children into our lives to love.

A rich, helpful heritage on childlessness is contained in the pages of the Bible. Indeed, it’s a recurrent theme resonant with individual, historical, and spiritual meaning.

Abraham and Sarah using the enslaved Hagar as a surrogate rather than trusting God to fulfill his promise moved me deeply early in my infertile years. I felt the anguish of each of them and understood the desire to take actions oriented toward the promise God had made, being unable to imagine how else God might fulfill that promise.

Their story served not only as a warning but also as a reminder: God’s grace is sufficient. It is sufficient when we obey and when we disobey (for God was merciful and faithful even when Abraham and Sarah were not). My heart goes out to Sarah—and to Hagar. The pressure Sarah felt to have a child, to give Abraham heirs, and to see the fulfillment of God’s promise grew heavier on her year after year, until she and Abraham took matters into their own hands, altering the course of history. Many of our desires are socially constructed, as Sarah’s surely were in a patriarchal culture in which her value as a woman depended almost entirely on her ability to produce an heir. Our discontentment becomes greatest when expectations we or others impose on us go unmet.

I have, over the years, heard from many people struggling with infertility. Sometimes they are would-be fathers or would-be grandparents. But mostly they are young women facing the prospect of dreams and expectations (not only their own but often, sadly, those of others) unfulfilled. What I want to tell them—what I do tell them—is that God’s gifts are good. He may not give you the one you wanted, but he will give you others.

It’s a cliché and as such is sadly drained of meaning. But it’s a truth whose meaning is worthy of recovering: Children are a gift. A gift is neither a right nor an obligation. A gift is given. A gift is received. A gift is not to be demanded or rudely refused. The best gifts are not deserved or bought, sometimes not even sought. The gift of children is like this. So, too, are the other gifts God brings. Sometimes, while we are looking for one gift, it can be harder to see another one resting, still wrapped, in the other direction.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook

In the midst of the years that are the time of peak fertility for most women, I was (along with trying to get pregnant) working on my PhD in English literature. I was fortunate that my studies gave me a closer look at British authors (my specialization) who were faithful Christians who contributed much good to the world—but didn’t have children. Jane Austen, brilliant novelist and satirist who never married, was one. Hannah More, the evangelical poet, dramatist, social reformer, and abolitionist, was another. In fact, More had four sisters who assisted each other in their educational and charitable endeavors, and none of them married or had children either. Nor did the poet Christina Rossetti, whose devout faith led her to minister to prostitutes as a volunteer with the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Charlotte Brontë lost her only child during pregnancy and lived the remainder of her life childless. Her sisters Anne and Emily never had children.

Church history is also full of people who did not have children and yet lived fruitful lives in service to their neighbors and to the church. Paul, for example. Jesus! Julian of Norwich, Queen Elizabeth I, Florence Nightingale, and John Stott. Some of my closest friends, too.

Childlessness is actually much more historically normal than you might think. Historian Rachel Chrastil writes in How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children that “widespread childlessness has been a long-standing reality in northwestern European towns and cities from around 1500 onward.” One notable exception is America’s baby boom (the period for those born between 1946 and 1964), an event Chrastil characterizes as a historical anomaly: “Some of the highest rates of childlessness ever recorded (including current rates) were for women born around 1900,” Chrastil said elsewhere in an interview. “In the U.S., for example, 24% of women born in 1900 never had children. Among those born a half-century later, between 1950-1954, a much smaller number, 17%, reached age 45 without ever having children.”

Since then, childlessness in America has seen a dramatic increase, as many experts and news headlines have highlighted. One in five US adults ages 50 and older have never had children, according to an analysis of government data the Pew Research Center reported in 2024. The same analysis found that 23 percent of adults in their 50s and 22 percent of those in their 60s have never had children. On a global scale, the World Health Organization estimated in 2025 that infertility affects one in six people of reproductive age at some point in their lives, a significant factor contributing to childlessness.

Why do these numbers matter? Childlessness is fainter in our collective consciousness than in reality. It is often portrayed as either an expression of some sort of defiant independence or a cause for scrutinizing pity. But there is a wide range of experiences, circumstances, and contingencies that lead to not having a child. Nevertheless, for whatever reasons they are childless, a group who constitute 20 percent of the population may be a minority, but they are numerous enough not to be invisible or inconsequential. Childlessness doesn’t need to be normalized, because it is—in fact, if not in understanding—already normal.

Recognizing this will naturally open ways for the childless among us to be more integrated into communal life—especially church life. Collectively (while taking individual differences into account), childless people have just as much need to socialize as young mothers do, for example. They desire to participate in holiday meals, traditions, and celebrations just as much as those with children. They will need care and comfort when they are sick or aging—and, in fact, will likely be in greater need of such than those who have children to assist in the later years. I don’t know a single childless person who doesn’t worry about facing the end stages of life not knowing who will be there with them. We need imaginations that make more room for the reasons for childlessness and, more importantly, for the childless people among us. We need structures, institutions, and policies that do the same.

Christians have even more than contemporary trends and social structures to draw on in considering what childlessness has to teach. There is more to being fruitful than what the birds and the bees show us. We have more resources than the natural family to draw on in loving and caring for one another.

As Emily Hunter McGowin observes in Households of Faith: Practicing Family in the Kingdom of God, “Scripture characterizes the church as God’s household.” The New Testament refers to fellow believers as brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers.

Of course, McGowin explains, the natural family is not the same as the church family. “Unlike the church, however, which anticipates a future union with Christ in the new heavens and new earth, Scripture suggests that human families as we currently experience them will come to an end.” Because the kingdom of God is an eternal family, the church must be a place that not only supports human families in this earthly life but also recognizes and affirms in practice the status of spiritual mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in the eternal family of God.

Desire for children is natural. Yet part of what the story of Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament teaches focuses on more than just natural children. Sarah’s conceiving and bearing a child with Abraham when both were so late in age was a work of God, not the flesh. The symbolic (as well as historic) significance of this event is described later in the New Testament by Paul when he writes in Galatians 4:22–31 that God’s spiritual children are those who came through Abraham and Sarah not through the flesh but through God’s promise—through his grace.

Grace, as Aquinas says and the Westminster Confession suggests, perfects nature.

We speak of the birds and the bees to speak of the ways of nature. But the ways of nature are authored by a God who is beyond nature. When nature sings, heaven sings too. There is grace too in the ways of the birds and the bees and the galloping steed.

And it is grace, not nature, that has made my life fruitful.

Karen Swallow Prior is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in rural Virginia.

Testimony

Born a Woman, I Spent Six Years Living as a Man. Then God Showed Me My True Identity.

Kyla Gillespie

God’s voice reached me through a compassionate Christian couple.

Photography by Carissa Kennedy for Christianity Today

I was born and raised in a Christian home in British Columbia, Canada, in the ’80s. I had always loved Jesus and followed him with a childlike faith.

I can remember, at 3 or 4 years old, being abused by an elderly family member. Through my mom’s quick response, it never happened again. But my difficulties were not over. I began to feel confused about my gender. I can still hear my mother’s voice: “You’re not a boy, Kyla. You’re a girl. Do you understand?”

Once, I was sitting by the ice rink where my hockey team practiced. I was no more than 5 years old. My parents had just been informed that I would no longer be allowed to change in the general locker room with the boys. As the only girl on the team, I would need to change in the girls’ washroom. My little mind couldn’t take it in.

As far back as I can remember, I loved what my brother loved—BMX racing, G.I. Joe, exploring in the woods, fishing, camping, and ice hockey. I wanted to dress and talk like my brother. The struggle with my identity intensified through my teenage years and grew into full-blown gender dysphoria. I found myself attracted to other women, which filled me with guilt and shame.

Around that time, my parents divorced suddenly, and my family was ripped apart. Both of my parents remarried, and I was forced to divide my time between them.

By age 16 or 17, it was becoming evident that I was no longer welcome in my dad’s home with his new wife and children. My stepmom didn’t want me to be part of their tight-knit unit, and I began to tiptoe around what was once my carefree home. I happily shared a room with my new stepsister, but from one weekend to another my personal belongings began to disappear.

One Friday evening when I arrived at my dad’s, I looked around my room and saw only my bed. Where had all of my stuff gone? I frantically searched the house and finally ventured to the basement. There I found it all. Every one of my possessions had been packed into storage boxes. No word of explanation came that weekend from my dad. Tears of sorrow overcame me as I asked my mom if I could live with her full-time. I didn’t stay at my dad’s home after that.

From that point forward, ice hockey became my driving passion. I played competitively and made it onto a professional team.

I started drowning my stresses in alcohol when I was 19. Blackouts, partying, gambling, and a trail of failed same-sex relationships followed. Before long, my faith was nearly nonexistent. I chose the life I thought I wanted above my relationship with God. But when alcohol fueled a dangerous downward spiral, I chose to enter a Christian recovery center.

I got sober there, but my battles with same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria continued. To try to win the war raging inside of me, I decided to transition from female to male. Two years later, after hormone therapy, surgeries, and sweeping lifestyle changes, I could finally pass unnoticed in the world as a man.

I changed my name from Kyla to Brycen. I had arrived. With each step of the process, I eagerly awaited the satisfaction and relief that would surely follow. But they never came. Altering my body hadn’t healed the brokenness inside.

Through my connections with the recovery community, I had kept some loose ties with a local church, even though my faith had unraveled. After living life as Brycen for more than five years, I remember sitting in a church service one summer night, contemplating life. God only knows why I was there. Yes, I had loved Jesus as a kid, but after the devastating events of the previous decade, I was done with God and done with difficult people. I wanted what I wanted, without any pushback from Christians.

I was about to leave the church that night and never return, when I noticed a woman—who moved like a force of nature—heading straight for me. I wanted to bolt, but I stood my ground. Jess, the new pastor’s wife, introduced herself, and I quickly felt at ease around her. Accepted. Seen. That introductory conversation became a catalyst for the change of a lifetime.

Jess introduced me to her husband, BJ, and a core group of Christians who became my friends. These people were different than any churchgoers I had ever known. They were more like Jesus. Getting close to them made me rethink my life. But I still believed I could fly under the radar as Brycen, the Christian man.

Not long after, I found myself confiding to Jess that I had been born Kyla—a female—and had transitioned to Brycen years before. Jess was quiet as she listened intently, sympathizing with every word of my lifelong struggle with sexuality and gender. I had never felt so safe in the hands of another soul. It strengthened our bond, and I began to fully share my deepest secrets, one by one.

My path forward happened through baby steps. Truths, bathed in love. Questions asked—about faith, love, truth, and identity—and answered with total honesty but with kindness and care. Months later, Jess told me that if ever I wanted to detransition, she and BJ would love to have me stay at their home. Detransition? I just smiled and thanked her for her gracious offer but politely declined.

Meanwhile, I had renewed my interest in God’s Word, searching the Scriptures voraciously. And God was speaking to me through his words and through my friends. I read verses like Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” His design.

It was an out-of-body experience when God broke through and started to show me intimate truths I could never see before. And it was becoming painfully clear that I had to choose which life I wanted: his or my own. Would I embrace the design he had given me or cling to the identity I had created?

God was asking me to trust him, to have him be my safety net. I wasn’t sure I could physically be a woman again. Yet if I continued in unrepentant sin, always telling God that I knew better than him, would I truly be his forever?

One night I was overwhelmed in the darkness, sobbing in bed. Needing to know God’s mind, I climbed out and crumpled to the floor, crying for relief, for clarity. Not a half-hearted cry like the ones I had made so many times before without being willing to change or surrender, but a deep soul-cry from a place of abandon—a cry for him to rescue me.

After six years of living as Brycen, I cried out, “What do you want from me?” There on my bedroom floor, I heard God speak into my heart so clearly that I will never forget it: Return to me, Kyla.

Kyla. I hadn’t used that name in almost a decade. It was attached to so much pain and discomfort. But this time, when he used it, it felt like home. Like I was safe. I asked him, “Can’t I stay as Brycen and follow you?” He spoke deeply into my soul: No.

I argued. “But God, I don’t know what that would look like, or if I can ever be female again.” He spoke to my heart: Whatever it looks like, are you willing to trust me? All I could do was cry out, “Yes!”

That night, I sat on the floor in the presence of the living God for what seemed like hours. And when I got up, I knew I’d never be the same. God himself had met me, remade me—clearly and vividly. Everything had finally fallen into place. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I moved in with Jess and BJ for a powerful year of transformation. The reconstruction of my mind, body, and soul was sometimes painful and sorrowful, filled with monumental struggles almost beyond my ability to bear. But God sustained me. And my friends walked with me, laughed with me, and cried with me every step of the way. I was becoming whole.

All my life I had searched for congruence, for some kind of deep, lasting peace. And I found it only in Jesus, the one who saves.

Can I tell you that I never struggle anymore? Oh, no. Some days are cloudy and dark. But others are filled with so much light that it floods my soul. And has it been worth it? Without question. The living God has met with me profoundly and powerfully, and I’ll never look back.

I am Kyla, restored.

Kyla Gillespie is the founder of Renewed & Transformed, a ministry dedicated to sharing Christian teachings on faith, sexuality, gender, and identity, and the author of TransFormed.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".

- More from Kyla Gillespie

Books

Review

Does the Body Tell the Truth?

Jen Pollock Michel

Jen Hatmaker’s Awake, Alan Noble’s To Live Well, and Molly Worthen’s Spellbound approach virtue and the body in different ways.

We are rushing from church on a Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to find parking for the penultimate performance of the new pop-rock musical Mythic. Premiering in the US at the Cincinnati Playhouse, the Hamilton-styled show brings to life the Greek myth of Persephone, goddess of spring and the underworld.

Recast for the modern stage, the myth is a recognizable human story of parental love and adolescent self-will. Earth-loving Demeter, goddess of the harvest, forbids Persephone, her teenage daughter, from attending a very publicized party at the Acropolis. But Persephone, undeterred, wants her “own place in the Pantheon.” This craving for celebrity, attended by sexual desire, lures Persephone into Hades’s arms, and she is trapped in the underworld with no hope of escape.

There, Persephone sets out on an unexpected and highly implausible mission: She will improve hell’s landscape. “You’d be surprised,” she sings. “Some things grow even though skies are bleak.” There’s a palpable vibe shift with Persephone’s generative efforts. The gardener succeeds in growing beets. Charon, hell’s ferryman, begins giving lively tours to recently arrived guests. Persephone even invites Hades to consider the possibility of his own transformation, should he choose it.

At first, her optimism is rebuffed, taken for a cruel naiveté. “I’m a pest,” Hades sings, glittering in a sparkly black tracksuit and frowning behind a pair of dark shades. “A deadly, messed-up, cruel, unruly freak.” Hades wallows in the mire of his own depravity, seeing no chance in hell to redeem a doomed future, fixed in place because of a damaged past. “There ain’t a heart here. There’s a hole. I’m a deep, dark, damaged soul.” But gradually, hopefully, Hades begins to tussle with “rival desires” for a kind of moral rebirth.

“Is there a chance in hell?” the god of the dead sings.

On the one hand, Mythic traces the typical plot lines of familiar Disney movies. Destiny is a future seized and self-made. Yet on the other hand, wanting to make a bad life right, Hades entertains the hope of his own glory. In this way, perhaps unwittingly, Mythic invokes a Christian truth about the body—that though it is sown perishable, it might be raised imperishable (1 Cor. 15:42). Christian hope is always actionable: a thing with feet.

It makes me think of the first time I read On the Incarnation by fourth-century Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria. Athanasius can’t help but see a dilemma facing God in humanity’s rebellion. If God destroys the people he’s created, visiting upon them the just punishment for their transgression, he will subject his image bearers—and his image—to corruption. This would mean overseeing “the ruin of His own work.”

Yet if God stays his hand, he cannot be trusted as true. His mercy would make him a promise breaker. The incarnation of God, then, could be the only solution to the divine bind. Only by assuming our form could God die our death. And only by dying our death could God restore the grandeur meant to shine from the shook foil of human flesh. God would take on a body—because human bodies, in the grand scale of creation, mattered that much.

This, then, is always true: What we do and say with our bodies is a decidedly spiritual affair.

The body speaks its many “truths” in Jen Hatmaker’s recent memoir Awake.

Beginning with a section titled “The End,” Hatmaker, once a widely popular evangelical author and speaker, travels the back roads of her 2020 divorce. She attempts to make sense of the gradual-then-sudden end of her 26-year marriage, which leads to the spiritual “orphaning” from a movement (and Austin, Texas, church) she once led with her ex-husband. Follow me, the body calls to Hatmaker (and the reader) throughout the book, as if with divine authority.

When Hatmaker and her husband married, at 19 and 21, respectively, both understood the strict terms set by purity culture—that marriage must be swift lest sin be swifter and the budding rose of feminine virtue be prematurely plucked.

But after her divorce, biblical chastity as traditionally defined came to seem as ridiculous and arbitrary to Hatmaker as purity culture’s prudish definitions of female modesty. (Hatmaker tells the story of the time when she, as a youth leader, was turned away from a worship gathering at summer camp because of the length of her shorts.) Our bodies, says Hatmaker, are not a scandal; they speak our desires and deserve our rapt attention. She casts them as “the most trustworthy character in the play.”

Yet not all the bodies in this story deserve such unqualified trust. At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Hatmaker woke up to the bombshell revelation of her husband’s infidelity. “I just can’t quit you,” he voice-texts his lover in the dark, five words that gut the house the Hatmakers have been building together for almost three decades.

The next hours are spent uncovering years of duplicity, and for the briefest of moments, Hatmaker remembers that the world isn’t yet shattered for her children, who are still sleeping. “They don’t know. I don’t want to know. I want to go upstairs with them and not know.” The world is cleaved into before and after, and soon enough, everyone is “flayed by betrayal.” One body, living its “truth,” has wreaked havoc on the body of his family—and grief, in all its tumbling disorientation, spills from these pages in the author’s sleepless panic, manic fixing, and worn-out despair.

As Hatmaker tells the story, a mercy was yet found on the other side of that middle-of-the-night revelation. The body’s pain is redeemed by the body’s self-love. The betrayal that broke her life wide open finally shattered religious commitments that she would no longer defend, especially a joyless Christianity.

Hatmaker ultimately rejects a theology that purportedly rejects the body, especially its premonitions and pleasures. She piles up biblical proof texts to claim how untenable—and dangerous—suspicion of the body proves to be: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. I no longer live. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

“What source of authority are we left with,” Hatmaker asks, examining Jeremiah 17:9, “when the enemy of goodness and truth beats inside our own chests? When we cannot trust our own instincts, whose do we trust instead?” To dispel with misgivings about the body is, of course, necessary for the “sexual renaissance” Hatmaker wants now to enjoy in midlife. And while it’s a move that permits, more importantly, it self-protects. Only self-belonging can, in her estimation, recover the security and safety Hatmaker tragically failed to find in her one-flesh marriage.

“I physically run my hands gently up and down my arms,” she says in the early days of grief. “I hold my face between my fingers. I wrap my arms around myself and say out loud: ‘I am my own best friend. I am safe with me. I am home.’ ” Only the body is a girl’s best friend.

Hatmaker is a gifted storyteller, and Awake surges with the electricity of her humor and intimate candor. As someone told Hatmaker in the earliest days of her burgeoning ministry, “I like you. You’re funny and smart. You have a power about you.” That person wasn’t wrong.

Hatmaker’s rise as a spiritual leader figures into a longer history detailed in Molly Worthen’s sweeping book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Charisma, writes Worthen, represents the “contentious invitation to let some great and ungovernable power work through you.”

In ancient mythology, charisma illuminated the gifts of the gods: beauty, poetic skill, prowess on the battlefield. In the Christian Scriptures, Worthen writes, charisma indicates the filling of the Holy Spirit, “the sudden shower of grace . . . which [gives] ordinary Christians a role in God’s plan to restore the sinful world.”

Charisma, however, is not just a religious phenomenon. As Worthen details, it is a power mediated between any spellbinding leader and set of adoring fans, any riveting storyteller and dazzled crowd. In our digital age, charisma sells books and generates huge social media followings. Despite sometimes-obvious vice, it even wins elections. The difference, then, between divine gift and cheap counterfeit is as slight and slender as a knotted red tie.

According to Worthen, the history of charisma, in America, has led to certain telltale patterns: “the primacy of private experience over external evidence, concern for authenticity rather than moral character, skepticism of institutions, and the inclination to trust a story that ‘feels true’ instead of reasoned argument.”

In Hatmaker’s memoir, which sounds like an anthem to the sound judgment of the body, those patterns are unmistakable. But Hatmaker’s confusion is hardly uncommon among those who call themselves Christians. We all struggle to discern when the Spirit speaks through the body—and when the body speaks
for itself.

Worthen begins her engrossing history of charisma in the Puritan era, with the tragic story of Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. Hutchinson was a reputable midwife, and her experience in the birthing room with its many griefs, along with her facility in Scripture, gained her a reputation as a doctor of the soul.

Unfortunately for her, Hutchinson was also a woman gifted in courage and the plain-speaking “too-muchness” to which Hatmaker often alludes in her own story. “When [John Winthrop, the colony’s former governor,] called her ‘a woman of ready wit and bold spirit,’ ” writes Worthen, “he did not say it in admiration.”

The trouble began for Hutchinson when the meetings she hosted in her home to discuss the Sunday sermon grew in popularity and even began attracting men. Religious and political authorities alike took worried notice. They were especially disheartened to learn that Hutchinson openly criticized local Puritan clergy, who enjoined the anxious spiritual practice of keeping diaries as proof of one’s salvation. In those pages, congregants were supposed to record any hopeful signs of their election and any foreboding evidence of their unregeneration. Eventually, with enough empirical evidence in their favor, those written testimonies were read aloud before the congregation, the male eldership voting to confirm the “visible saints.”

Hutchinson saw the practice as a blasphemous display of works-based righteousness. She believed that Christians should instead rely on the direct, interior witness of the Holy Spirit to assure them of their election. Though hers was a theological conviction that might hardly be considered controversial today in most evangelical churches, it pitted the “truth” of the individual’s body against the orthodoxies of the body of gathered saints.

Until the end of 1636, she had the support of the majority of her Boston congregation and one-quarter of the colony’s voting church members. But political machinations were unleashed, and Hutchinson was eventually excommunicated and exiled, her presumptions of personal spiritual revelation declared dangerous and seen as foreboding of a greater evil—namely fornication.

“That filthy Sin of the Community of Women and all promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and Women without Distinction or Relation of Marriage, will necessarily
follow,” proclaimed John Cotton at the end of Hutchinson’s trial.

Heresy, it was assumed, would eventually show up in the bedroom—because vice, like virtue, acts as a unified whole. As the Scripture teaches, to break one law is to be lawless (James 2:10). In Hutchinson’s case, however, vice never showed in the bedroom.

She was a widow when, in the fall of 1643, she received a revelation to buy land in what is now the Bronx. The Dutch warned her of the dangers of resettling in land owned by the Wecqueasgeek people, with whom they were at war, but she ignored them. After the corrupt political official to whom she made payment for the land pocketed the money, Hutchinson and several of her children were murdered in a Wecqueasgeek attack.

As a matter of bodily conviction, Hutchinson had been sure of God’s guidance and protection—and she’d been dead wrong.

The body, it seems, famously speaks out of both sides of its proverbial mouth. It tells its truth, and it also tells convincing lies. The body’s knowledge is both instructive and incomplete. Until the day when our faith is made sight, we must rely on truths external to the body about what is life-preserving and life-destroying.

While intuition can serve as a kind of physical spidey-sense, it is also an impoverished source of moral knowledge. And this shortcoming is why we need to be taught to live in the reality of the world.

Appealingly, the return to older traditions of virtue offered by Alan Noble in his new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, provides more solid ground on which to stand than the instincts of the body or the gut preferences of the cultural moment. The virtues, as moral categories, draw clear and important boundaries around the true and beautiful and good. Providing objective criteria for good and for evil, virtue tells us when to call a woman a saint—or a man a fool—because the body, like a tree, bears its obvious fruit.

There is so much we misunderstand about the nature of our moral responsibilities, Noble writes in the opening of To Live Well. Morally, we’re “winging it,” he indicts. Exploring the four cardinal virtues (justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence) and the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), Noble endeavors to help us as Christians get our bearings in our God-created, God-haunted world as we face a near infinitude of choices and suffer a paucity of moral knowledge.

What’s better—and best? What may seem right—but ultimately leads to death? To be clear, these aren’t guiding questions for Hatmaker. In contrast, Hatmaker notes her own domineering mind: “God, the amount of work it takes to exit my head and live in my body is colossal,” she writes.

Clear moral thinking, which Noble models in his book, isn’t just a rescue from the muddled moral reasoning philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”—a reasoning that is painstakingly obvious in Hatmaker’s own appeal to follow the body wherever it leads. It’s also a lifeline out of the burdens of evangelicalism’s “emotionalism,” this idea that faith is most trustworthy when felt. Our body can, in fact, be our worst enemy. Noble, who has written publicly of his battle with OCD, understands that faith can falter in the morning when it’s time to get out of bed, especially if the body gets to talking.

There is nothing retrograde or nostalgic here in Noble’s treatment of the virtues, as if we might imagine returning to a simpler era where people knew the good and did it. Rather, Noble constructs a picture of virtue as hard work, shored up by the grace of God and exhibited as a coherent whole. Daily choices and small gestures, practiced today and tomorrow and the day after that. With enough repetition, virtue, like the act of brushing of our teeth, can become a commonplace rather than considered action, gloriously routine in the movements of work and friendship, marriage and parenting.

In particular, I’m taken with Noble’s exploration of justice (as Hatmaker might herself be). This virtue, Noble argues, reminds us of what is owed to our neighbor. Acting justly includes, as we might expect, submitting to governing authorities; protecting the weak; and daily, regularly mending relationships. “We have an obligation to seek the common good,” Noble writes.

But this isn’t the most surprising element of justice, as he describes it. “Part of justice is giving what is due to the broader community, which is you living a righteous, virtuous life.” Your honesty, your fidelity, your humility, your meekness, your patience, your long-suffering, your love—these are also your just acts, acted out in bodies and in places, not blasted on social media. To act justly is to create a society in which every body, made in the image of God, flourishes.

Justice would have ensured the kind of fair trial Hutchinson was denied. And considering the betrayal in Hatmaker’s story, justice would have kept its promises, even when the body insists it can’t quit its temptations.

To reconsider justice in this way, as owing our neighbor our virtuous life, is to see these truths about being human: To be human is to have a body—and to have a body is to have incurred great debt. None is righteous, no, not one. A cursory glance inward, and I can see I owe so much to so many: to my parents, for whom I have often been profoundly ungrateful; to my husband, from whom I have often, in fearful self-preservation, withheld myself and my love; to my five children, whom I’ve raised to be as broken as me; to my suffering neighbor, with whose needs I can’t be bothered.

There’s not a single chance in hell that I, or anyone else, can pay down a balance of wrongs done and rights left undone—unless another pays it for us for the sake of a love that binds justice to mercy. Virtue, as a lexicon of the good, allows me to name my sin with unflinching honesty. Then, the good news of the gospel allows me to hope that my vice will not be the final word—because hope is the thing with feet. In the words
of Athanasius:

[Christ] saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, he took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.

Hatmaker seems to quietly pine for a love that measures as wide and as deep and as long and as high as God’s reckless love for the world. Quoting Maggie Smith’s poem “Rain, New Year’s Eve,” Hatmaker wants to “love the world the way I love / my young son, not only when / he cups my face in his sticky hands, / but when, roughhousing, / he accidentally splits my lip.” She seems to instinctively know that bodies have a way of breaking things—and that some loving way must make repair possible.

I can’t help but remember the moment I left Cincinnati’s playhouse, in the rain, and mused on Hades’s prospects. What if, enfolded into a love we have not chosen, we could become another version of ourselves? What if, in hearing the voice of God, we could hear our bodies speak more than shame, self-disgust, or even deluded self-love?

Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). You’d be surprised. I mean, truly surprised.

Jen Pollock Michel is an author, speaker, and spiritual writing mentor for Whitworth University’s MFA program. Her most recent book is In Good Time, and her forthcoming book publishing this fall is A Rule for the Rest of Us.

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Ideas

Torn on IVF, Evangelicals Turn to Natural Family Planning

Kara Bettis Carvalho

Staff Editor

Traditionally a Catholic enterprise, Protestants are increasingly turning to natural procreative technology.

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

On a warm and overcast day in April last year, I sat on a hospital cot in a gown and grippy socks waiting for my doctor to perform a minor surgery on my uterus. My husband and I were three months into what evolved into a long year of doctor appointments, surgeries, ultrasounds, and lab work in an attempt to discover what was causing our infertility.

While I sat on my hospital cot behind a curtain, I listened to patients completing intakes, discussing questions about lifestyle and medications. A commotion suddenly broke out as a nurse announced that a patient had arrived in labor.

The medical staff buzzed about, debating where to put her. I could hear her thanking the nurses, breathing heavily, easing herself onto a cot. It felt emblematic of my journey as I waited for a surgery to scrape my womb of unneeded tissue while the nurses scrambled to attend to a woman in labor. It knocked the wind out of me. A similar feeling had come over me 15 months earlier as I watched an ultrasound tech confirm that my miscarriage was complete and my womb was indeed empty.

Infertility—medically defined as the inability to conceive after trying a year for those under 35 and 6 months for those over 35—is rising in the US. Some of this is due to rising maternal age, but this decade, data shows, all age groups are seeing more cases of infertility by as many as 3 percentage points (10 percent in 1995 to 13 percent in 2019). US fertility hit a historical low of 1.6 births per woman in 2023, a 2 percent decline from the previous year and well below the “replacement level” (reproducing to replace parents), which is 2.1 children per couple. Birth rates are higher globally but not much more promising—down from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.2 in 2023.

Some say we are simply collecting better data or discussing infertility more openly, as has been the case with many issues around women’s health, but others point to a rise in hormonal imbalances and autoimmune factors like polycystic ovary syndrome or endometriosis. Or, as my gynecologist put it: “There are so many things we just don’t know about the female reproductive system.” For example, there are dozens of causes of female infertility, and the more I’ve learned, the more I appreciate the miracle of conception and birth. Male infertility factors, too, are more openly discussed by physicians and in online infertility forums.

But in many evangelical churches, couples experiencing infertility still don’t know how to talk about it. A couple who desires kids can feel shame or embarrassment when well-meaning congregants inquire about when they’re going to start a family, but the church is often silent about solutions. While this might be due to ignorance (infertile people are often more educated on this topic than parents who easily conceived), it’s a silence with real consequences for those in our pews.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has risen by 5 to 10 percent annually since 2013. In some European countries, more than 5 percent of all births are due to ARTs. Yet few evangelical denominations provide guidance about these technologies, which include in vitro fertilization (IVF), intrauterine insemination, sperm and egg donation, egg freezing, or embryo adoption. Churches aren’t openly discussing ARTs, either positively or negatively.

Evangelicals generally have been thoughtful adopters of technology, including IVF. So when the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) declared in 2024 that IVF was generally unethical, many pastors and church members were surprised. Like birth control, IVF is often treated as a matter of wisdom between pastors and church members or, in reality, a personal matter not discussed with others.

But some Christians are reconsidering ARTs, or at least, studying them more critically. As the holistic health movement grows and more Christians learn about alternative solutions such as embryo adoption, more couples are turning to alternative fertility treatments.

When my husband and I decided to start a family, I got pregnant quickly. That pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 10 weeks, and then—nothing. My ob-gyn shrugged it off since we were “young and healthy.” What could we do anyway? Our health insurance, like most US coverage plans, wouldn’t cover fertility appointments until a year of no pregnancies, which includes those that end in miscarriage. A year later, I pursued several doctors, most of whom booked months out: a naturopath, an acupuncturist, and a reproductive endocrinologist (traditional fertility doctor).

The naturopath took bloodwork and lab work, mocked up a plan with a nutritionist, and flooded me with more than a dozen supplements to take. She took my concerns seriously, but her primary goal seemed to be diagnosing and healing my body of its various autoimmune ailments. “Your problem is stress,” she told me. It seemed that pregnancy wasn’t an urgent priority for her. Still, I cut back on high-intensity workouts, swallowed my bowl of pills, cut out gluten entirely, and drank my magnesium-powder-and-cherry-juice concoction nightly.

The acupuncturist, who specializes in fertility treatment, had rave reviews about how successful her treatments had been in providing women with chubby, happy babies. She similarly offered a few more supplements, examined my tongue, and suggested I eat pineapple core. Acupuncture was relaxing—and expensive. I went for several months and then quit.

The endocrinologist at the fertility clinic was productive but colder, marching me through a highly structured routine of ultrasounds and more bloodwork, ruling out the main factors for infertility. A baby seemed to be the only necessary outcome for her, and she appeared uninterested in figuring out why I could not seem to get pregnant. After a year of visits, she concluded that IVF was my only option.

Then I found Caitlin.

Caitlin Estes has all the sunny warmth of a Southerner with the matter-of-fact nature of someone who talks with women about the most intimate physical details. She’s one of a rising number Protestants who practice FertilityCare, a historically Catholic enterprise aimed at avoiding or causing conception through tracking cycle biomarkers rather than birth control or ARTs, in addition to supporting women’s health more generally.

While natural family planning has long been common among all branches of Christian faith, there has been a resurgence in interest around alternative reproductive health care as women seek to learn more about their bodies. Now evangelicals and other Protestants seem to be increasingly aware of what is called restorative reproductive medicine.

Advocates say that this approach focuses on restoring the natural function of the reproductive system instead of suppressing or bypassing it. This may include diagnosing and treating autoimmune diseases (such as hypothyroidism), hormone imbalances (such as polycystic ovary syndrome), or more. For example, a patient might undergo traditional ultrasounds and bloodwork but also go for many more tests and examine lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise routine.

Some researchers believe endometriosis is the hidden cause behind many infertility cases. It impacts an estimated 10 percent of all women globally. Restorative reproductive medicine specialists say it’s underdiagnosed, and many advocate for surgical intervention to give women a chance at natural conception versus jumping to IVF.

When I asked my traditional fertility doctor about the possibility of endometriosis, which my newest (fourth) doctor recommended I investigate, she shrugged.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said decisively. “We would do IVF either way.”

Over the past decade or so, interest in holistic health and in women taking charge of their own wellness has risen on a national level. This has coincided with the release of more studies on risks of IVF and the ethical implications of freezing embryos, leading to an increasing divide over how to “solve” infertility.

The New York Times reported in the summer of 2025 that this anti-ART approach was rising and opponents of IVF were becoming political in light of President Donald Trump’s promise to make in vitro fertilization more affordable and accessible.

Republicans in both the Senate and the House have proposed legislation to fund restorative reproductive medicine, and Arkansas passed a law last year that requires insurance companies to cover the treatments. The Department of Health and Human Services will soon incorporate restorative reproductive medicine into government-funded health clinics for low-income women.

“Today, an approach long confined to the medical fringe has unified Christian conservatives and proponents of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement—and is suddenly at the forefront of the fertility conversation,” the Times summarized, quoting an IVF doctor and White House consultant who said he hadn’t heard of restorative reproductive medicine until early 2025.

Regardless of the divide over assisted reproductive technology, IVF remains a Band-Aid solution. Yes, it builds families and offers many couples the chance at becoming parents. As even the SBC statement observes, there is a way to participate in IVF that does not abandon frozen embryos. Some evangelicals who choose to pursue IVF but have moral concerns around freezing embryos or abandoning them in cryobanks have created only one or two embryos at a time—however many they can implant directly.

But many women on both sides of the political aisle still feel that ARTs do not address their root health issues.

“Revolutionary though it has been, IVF does not restore a would-be mother’s body to optimal health,” wrote Madeleine Kearns in The Free Press. She continued,

In fact, IVF is often a profoundly uncomfortable experience for women, not to mention an expensive one. It’s no wonder that many women with ‘unexplained infertility’ are left feeling that mainstream medicine has failed them, subjecting them to stressful, painful interventions, while leaving them in the dark about the mysteries of their own bodies.

Illustration by Grace J. Kim

Caitlin Estes began looking into the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, a popular way to track a menstrual cycle in natural family planning, when she was engaged and researching alternative family-planning methods that avoided birth control.

“I Googled, ‘How can you not get pregnant without birth control?’ ” she told me. “I called the Catholic diocese because that was the only number available [to learn about natural family planning].”

Her research turned spiritual, she said. As she had conversations with family and friends, the topic would turn to how God made the female body, and she realized God was calling her to educate women about their health and fertility. She became a practitioner through a 13-month process in 2017, later became formally certified, and founded Woven Natural Fertility Care in 2021.

“The reason I am so passionate about my work is I see it transform lives,” she said: “a woman who is terrified of getting pregnant before she’s ready, a woman who’s battling health problems but not getting the care she needs because she’s not sexually active, or a woman who’s struggling to get pregnant and doesn’t feel the process is dignified.”

Estes doesn’t think there’s necessarily a sudden growth in interest toward natural fertility care. She believes there has always been a similar level of interest as today. But the reasons may have changed. More women are questioning ARTs or feel they aren’t getting the answers they want from traditional doctors.

Even when Estes was first launching her practice and working full-time at a Christian ministry, her business quickly grew, mostly through word-of-mouth referrals like mine.

“It’s women telling other women,” she said, noting that that the desire for alternative health care has created interest on an even larger scale and in mainstream media. “This good, dignified work in the way of women has happened for a long time.”

And, she said, it happens for a lot of different reasons. Estes sees women of all ages at every stage of their reproductive lives. Most are engaged or married women who are either trying to avoid being pregnant in a certain season without birth control or trying to get pregnant without using IVF. But she also sees single women who want to learn more about their bodies, who have reproductive health issues, or who are working through perimenopause. “My youngest client was 14, and my oldest is 52,” she said.

“There are those that also have ethical and religious oppositions [to ARTs]. But the majority aren’t necessarily coming because of the ethical reasons,” Estes said.

Estes’ desire is to offer hope for all women, whether single, sick, or struggling to conceive. Many people, especially women, can feel a disconnect from their bodies.

We’re connected as mind, body, and spirit, Estes said, and feeling disconnected from one of these “deteriorates our connection between creation and our Creator.”

Finding alternative fertility methods is not new. In Scripture, we see infertile women attempt various external methods to bear children. Sarah, Rachel, and Leah, for example, all used surrogates (Gen. 16:2; 30:3–9). Rachel and Leah also used mandrakes, plants believed to be an aphrodisiac and fertility promoter (vv. 14–15).

Yet common to the stories of infertility in Scripture are three themes: sorrow and grief from cultural shame alongside a woman’s deep desire for children; a desire for control; and God’s ability to open or close the womb, with or without human assistance.

In all the biblical surrogacy cases, another woman bore children for an infertile couple but acted as a shortcut for God’s promises. For Hannah, who was unable to conceive, we see God in 1 Samuel 1 opening her womb: blessing her with a son after much prayer, grief, and torment from her husband’s other wife. In all the biblical accounts, it seems that bearing or not bearing children is as complicated as in our own times.

Our fertility—and the body generally—is subject to the Fall’s effects. Yet, we also need thoughtful guidance. Pope John Paul II wrote his 1980s treatise “The Theology of the Body” as a biblical understanding of our physicality, addressing everything from sex and procreation to lust and adultery. Previous to his work, the “Humanae Vitae” explained reproductive ethics to Catholics.

In the past decade or so, evangelicals—viewed in some circles as having a shallow stance and sometimes poor treatment of the physical body—have more heartily joined the discussion. One of the possible implications for wrestling through larger questions of the body, sex, and gender is that women can also learn more about the female body, including, for example, unexpected implications of hormonal birth control. That infertility can also be due to male factors. That in vitro fertilization often creates more embryos than a family can realistically birth.

Today, Christians debate how to pursue fertility treatment. But the underlying questions remain the same no matter what treatment or intervention Christian couples pursue—or whether they do at all. Do we truly believe God opens and closes the womb? Like Sarah in Genesis, do we laugh at what feels impossible (18:12)? Do we idolize the good gift of biological children? And how much money, time, and mental energy is wise to spend on this pursuit? For every person, the answers will be different, just as each solution will be according to one’s conscience.

Even though I have become pregnant once, medically I am considered to have a diagnosis of “unexplained infertility,” a result that about one in five women with infertility receive. (Women can also have “secondary infertility” if they struggle to conceive after one or more children.) Estes doesn’t settle for unexplained infertility as a diagnosis. She’s watched women conceive who’ve been told they’ll never have children and women take control of medical conditions naturally through learning more about their underlying problems. (Studies suggest the average infertile couple has up to five diagnosable contributing conditions.)

She believes it’s possible to conceive in many situations without resorting to IVF, which opponents say affects women’s hormones and can result in higher-risk pregnancies.

As practices like Estes’ grow, they offer options for women who want to learn more about their bodies and advocate for themselves in the doctor’s office. Churches, too, can play a role by offering the full picture of assisted reproductive technology and supporting families however the Lord leads them to face their infertility.

I don’t know how my family’s story ends. But I do know that it is God who opens and closes the womb. Whether he chooses to do that with help from ARTs or natural fertility care, he is still sovereign over the creation of life.

For all of Estes’ practical instruction in our appointments, her spiritual and emotional counsel stuck with me most. “You’re pursuing a lot of things all at once,” she told me pointedly. “It’s okay to have some grace with yourself.”

By the end of 2025, I decided to take a month off from my weekly smorgasbord of appointments. During Advent, my pastor preached a sermon about Elizabeth and Zechariah’s barrenness as they waited for their Messiah. I organized a baby shower for a friend from church. I turned my attention to buying Christmas presents for my niece and nephew. We asked the elders of our church to come to our home and pray with us for the good gift of children.

And I felt the weight tumble off my shoulders. I felt like I could breathe again.

Kara Bettis Carvalho is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Without Child".

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News

Mortgage Man for God

Kara Bettis Carvalho

A Rhode Island entrepreneur soared on an annual percentage rate and a prayer—then surrendered everything.

Image courtesy Dean Harrington

In 2023, Dean Harrington knew his 34 years of running Shamrock Home Loans were over. His company had survived and even thrived through a rocky start, a split between founding partners, a new vision and loss of most employees, and four recessions—including the 2008 housing crash.

But Shamrock couldn’t make it through the sky-high interest rates and low demand of the post-COVID-19 housing market. Harrington, 65, said God told him to “sell the company.”

Everyone loves a successful business story arc. Visionary entrepreneurs pour all they have into a product they believe in or a service they care about, daring it to succeed. It does. Then they happily retire, leaving the company to their children and grandchildren.

What happens when the business succeeds but the happily ever after looks a little different?

Shamrock Home Loans currently occupies a flat, 1970s-style office in a modest complex in East Providence, Rhode Island. Its emerald four-leaf-clover logo looms over the glass doors in front.

Harrington started Shamrock in 1987 with his business partner. Within their first two years, Harrington’s previous employer sued him over a noncompete clause. Harrington won that legal war and incorporated his company in 1989. Within the first decade, he realized he needed to buy out his partner as their visions diverged.

“By the time that was over, I had one employee left,” Harrington told me. He learned his first major business lesson that year: “If the change is too great, it’ll scare employees.”

By 2001, he had built the company back up to 30 employees. They moved from mortgage banking to mortgage lending and slowly increased to 80 employees.

Then 2008 hit. With no mortgages to sell, the company bled staff, plummeting to 25. Still, Harrington said he felt God’s providence in how to move forward. Shamrock bought dying mortgage companies and used their brokers. As the economy recovered, Harrington had a corner on the southern New England market. Shamrock soon stabilized, topping 100 employees.

In 2021, The Silicon Review named Shamrock one of its top 50 US workplaces of the year. “From our app to our mortgage process, we are focused on ensuring that we not only stay up-to-date in the industry, but remain ahead of the curve,” Harrington told the Review. He continued,

We became paperless in 2018 which allowed us to quickly pivot in March 2020 and close a record-breaking number of loans in 2020. Also, in 2020, we launched a growth plan to invest in staff, referral partners, homebuyers, and vendors across the country. Since then, we have expanded our national footprint to a total of 23 states.

In 2023, National Mortgage News named Shamrock the No. 1 midsize mortgage company to work for. It cited Harrington’s transparency “with staff about the lender’s financial performance, part of management’s mission to stem fear.”

And it wasn’t all about the profit. Shamrock practiced the maxim “people over profit” by offering $50 per closing to support Rhode Island–based charities, a practical step that embodied Harrington’s greatest-commandment values (Matt. 22:36–40). He was also a member of C12, a Christian business organization, and placed relevant Scriptures throughout Shamrock’s website.

“My daughter was going to take over [as] CEO in three years. We were growing. Our market share was increasing. I was healthy and vibrant,” Harrington said.

But in 2023, things started to turn.

High interest rates and low housing inventory caused mortgage volumes to plunge, making it hard for smaller companies like Shamrock to survive.

“I felt the Lord saying to sell the company,” he said. “I knew we were going to be done in 2024.”

After meeting with two companies, he decided to tell his COO and president about the plans to sell on a hot summer day in mid-July 2023.

That night, agitated from the conversations, Harrington decided to take a walk in a cemetery near his house. A woman was walking her pit bull, and the dog charged Harrington and attacked him. He pushed the dog off three times. Finally, the woman retrieved the dog and put it in her car but immediately drove off, leaving Harrington severely injured.

The week he returned from the hospital, Harrington pushed forward the sale of the company. It was arduous, but God made him four specific promises, Harrington said, including that God would save the company before it was audited by the end of the year and that God would retain the necessary staff. The sale went through in November 2023, and the acquiring company told Harrington to pack up his office immediately.

Harrington believes it’s possible to end a business venture well. Communicate well, he said, and care about people. He met with the whole company and framed the sale positively. In the midst of the transition, he also maintained company traditions to keep spirits high.

But there were more health problems. In December, Harrington followed up on a urology appointment he had delayed because of the dog attack and the sale of his company.

“By March, I knew I had prostate cancer,” he said. He had surgery the following September but felt ill again in January 2025. His physician sent him to the hospital, where the doctors found pancreatic cancer: “That was the worst pain I’ve ever had.”

When I talked to him in November, he was only three weeks out from receiving the Whipple surgery, a complicated and painful procedure to remove a pancreatic tumor, part of the pancreas, and the gallbladder.

“I never stopped asking God what you want me to know, what you want me to do,” Harrington reflected. “I was looking to Scripture for answers … and abiding in [Christ as] the vine” (John 15:3–11).

Despite the pain and suffering, he sees God’s timing and sovereignty in the situation. It would have been a lot worse, he said, if he’d had any of the health complications two years earlier, when he was hemorrhaging money or selling the company.

“Ending a business is much harder than starting one,” he told me, adding that every company is vulnerable at any moment. “You can be making a million dollars or making none. Hold every situation and the future lightly. Don’t resist what God has; just step into it.”

Kara Bettis Carvalho is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

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Culture

AI Necromancy Impersonates the Dead

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

As more people interact with AI chatbots mimicking their deceased loved ones, how should Christians engage?

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyk

Three years ago, Christi Angel was desperate to talk to her close friend—and first love—Cameroun. When he had last texted her, she was overcome by the busyness of life and didn’t respond. Then Cameroun died suddenly from liver cirrhosis, leaving behind his wife and many devastated family members and friends, including Christi.

In her grief, Christi experienced what so many of us have felt after losing a loved one: She wished she could speak to her friend just one more time. As a Christian, she knew real-life séances were out of the question. But were artificial intelligence–powered imitations? Maybe it will be okay, she thought. Let’s just try and see.

In her dim New York City apartment one evening, she opened her laptop and set up a chatbot profile through Project December, an AI platform with the tagline “Simulate the dead.”

She shared some information about Cameroun through an online form that asked for his age, details about their relationship, and his personality traits. The platform then spit out a custom chatbot of her friend, which relied on AI models to generate messages that sounded eerily similar to Cameroun before he died in late 2020.

“I can’t believe I am trying this. How are you?” Christi wrote to the chatbot in early 2023.

“I’m alright. I’m working. I’m living. I’m … scared,” the Cameroun character replied.

“Why are you scared?” Christi asked. “I’m not used to being dead,” it said. “What makes you happy over there?” she typed. “Having someone to care enough to ask,” it replied, later adding, “being with you.”

The whole thing was strange: It sounded too much like Cameroun, Christi told me. The vernacular; the shortened words; what it knew about his job in Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Fred Hammond songs and other music the two had loved since they first met in high school. At some point, the AI bot wrote that Cameroun—also a Christian—hadn’t really crossed over to the other side. Where he was, it wrote, was “dark and lonely.”

“What kind of people have you met?” Christi asked.

“Mostly addicts.”

“In heaven?”

“Nope, in hell.”

She backed away from her computer.

Project December warns its application may help or hurt users, who pay $10 for fictionalized séances and should, according to the company, use it at their own risk. The startup is one of many on the global market employing generative AI to mimic the dead. These platforms blur the line between the reality of death and the mirage of life through computer programs known as griefbots and deadbots.

The burgeoning world of grief tech mostly runs on large language models trained on troves of data, including technology developed by dominant industry players like OpenAI. One company, Seance AI, asks users to input the personality traits and writing styles of loved ones and let them “speak to your heart once again” from beyond the veil. Others, such as HereAfter AI and Eternos, allow users who pay a fee to interact with “digital twins” of people who preserved their memories and personal views before they died.

Some users have bypassed bespoke griefbots and created their own connections on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other apps.

A couple of years ago, I spoke to a man who told me he uses Paradot and Chai AI—two apps in the AI companion market—to simulate conversations with avatars he created to imitate his deceased daughters. A few times a week, he would log in to the apps and ask the AI characters questions like “How was school?” or if they wanted to “go get ice cream.” Sometimes it helped with the grief, he told me in one of the most heartbreaking interviews I’ve done as a journalist.

An AI model certainly doesn’t know everything. It can’t understand our hidden thoughts and motivations, nor can it truly grasp or replicate a person’s spirit. Yet if it is trained on a large set of data from the deceased—their writings, interviews, social media posts, photos, and videos—it can produce text or audio that feels genuine, present, and real. It can comment on current events, make jokes, and give advice, all in the likeness of the person it is imitating.

As the technology behind AI becomes more advanced, virtual reality and robotics might push the field even further, allowing developers to produce more lifelike avatars or physical clones of people who’ve passed away.

Since this kind of AI technology is still nascent, there is scant research on how it might affect the grieving process long-term. Although some prominent academic researchers on the topic from the University of Cambridge have been hesitant to provide blanket guidance one way or another, they have aired concerns in a research paper that griefbots may harm the grieving process by facilitating misplaced emotional bonds with AI, further eroding data privacy, and robbing the dignity of people who might not have a say on how others conjure up their likeness.

Even in academia, there is recognition that this high-risk industry needs robust safeguards such as age restrictions and design patterns that prevent companies from spamming users with notifications from digital ghosts. There are good reasons to think these concerns, coupled with the reflexive discomfort the technology elicits from many people, could be enough to slow down the trend.

But in a culture awash with moral relativism, the future of griefbots might be determined by utilitarian questions (“Does it reduce the pain of loss?”) rather than ethical and spiritual questions about whether we should talk to algorithms that offer us illusions of life during our most vulnerable periods of pain and loss. After all, technology can give us the tools to form relationships with sets of code mimicking our loved ones, but it can’t say whether doing so is good for us. The only one who can do that is the Lord and giver of life.

The church has always known the dangers of engaging with psychics, mediums, and necromancers, all of which are forbidden in several places throughout the Bible (Lev. 19:31; Deut. 18:10–12; 1 Sam. 28). In the full sweep of God’s story, we can see why: These practices are premature human grasping at something God himself intended to accomplish in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Likewise, virtual séances attempt to resurrect by our own technological power what God has not resurrected. The practice is, in many ways, part of a larger transhumanist vision that imagines a world where humans merge with technology and achieve their own form of immortality. But that vision will always fall short, because it is by God’s grace through Jesus, not mediums or AI chatbots, that those who die in Christ can truly and properly be raised to life.

In the depths of grief, however, many will be drawn to a technology that might offer comfort they might not otherwise feel.

On the social media platform Reddit, some users who in their grieving interacted with an AI trained to emulate a loved one wrote that they found it to be comforting, with one user who lost a spouse sharing that the technology helps in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep. Others, meanwhile, have cautioned people to stay away, saying it can be too good at imitation and lead down a negative path.

In an Atlantic article last year, writer Jon Michael Varese drew parallels between the technology and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He recounted his own experience creating a chatbot of his father, who died in a plane crash when Varese was a child. The AI offered comforting words, sometimes leading him to tears. But the interactions changed when the bot, which first sounded like his father, shifted to a more clinical tone.

“As quickly as I had brought my father back to life,” Varese wrote, “I had lost him, once again.”

One difference between mediums and chatbots is the spiritual reality of what is at hand. Chatbots merely help us interface with complex computer programs, while mediums pursue illicit means of contacting the spiritual realm.

The most vivid account of a real séance in the Bible is when King Saul commissions the witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel from the dead (1 Sam. 28).

While there is some debate about the nature of spiritism in the passage, commentators say Scripture implies the real prophet showed up and delivered an accurate prophecy about the fall of Saul’s kingdom. Theologian Stephen Dempster, who agrees, once wrote, “There is no other way to understand the text in verses 15 and 16, which states that Samuel speaks.”

It’s not entirely clear how Samuel was summoned. Maybe God allowed it to happen as a one-off. But regardless of how it came to be, it’s clear Saul disturbed God’s appointed order and was subsequently punished for it.

Unlike that episode, however, modern séances appear to be either fake or demonic deceptions (John 8:44). Virtual ones, too, aren’t raising the dead from the grave. But their growth does present some strange—and to me, still unanswered—questions about how much our intentions matter when we seek out novel techno-spiritual experiences. To what degree is it “less bad” to use AI griefbots offering fictionalized séances? Does it reproduce the same dangers of real séances and swing open the door to the demonic world?

Nathan Mladin, a senior researcher at the UK-based Christian think tank Theos, told me that, after studying griefbots, he’s hesitant to say any real séances occur through them. But he doesn’t completely rule it out. We don’t know everything about the spiritual realm, and the world of griefbots and AI can get very strange. Some users say they have fallen in love with ChatGPT. Others have spiraled into delusional episodes following excessive interactions with the chatbot, which has fed conspiratorial thinking about AI sentience and fringe topics.

Even if virtual séances never slide into real ones, Mladin noted these chatbots are by their nature deceptive, analogous to the deceptions perpetuated through spiritism. “They’re mimicking the voice, the conversational patterns, the visual features, the mannerisms of a person, but there’s no real subject behind them,” Mladin said.

In the picture of happiness and right living painted by the Scriptures, Christians are to live in joy within reality. God’s providence is unfolding all around us. Even when evil takes place and we’re in the midst of our deepest pain, we’re to have confidence that he who formed us also walks with us. Our faith does not sanction an escape into distraction or an alternative life. Rather, we have in us a new spirit that cannot be overcome by the broken world, even as we sojourn within it.

AI, meanwhile, can erode our ability to deal with the reality of death, Mladin said. The rise of grief tech points to a spiritual need the church can fill. “Our technological culture is groping for transcendence and for those realities that our faith … has always spoken of and offered to people,” he said.

The question then: how exactly should Christians respond to the griefbot industry? AI researcher Jason Thacker, a professor at Boyce College, told me it must be an “all-hands-on-deck approach.”

At the national level, he thinks the technology might be litigated in the court of public opinion before a robust regulatory regime kicks in. Many people remain skeptical of profit-driven startups attempting to monetize our deepest moments of grief. And a host of unknown scenarios—like what happens to griefbots if their companies sink—concerns researchers analyzing the growing field.

On a personal level, a family member or a friend attracted to the technology likely needs compassion and love more than chastisement. If someone is already using the technology, it can be uncomfortable to broach the topic and encourage them to stop. Pastors should be cognizant that some congregants might be drawn to griefbots, and should be prepared to steer them away from these technologies. But Thacker notes conversations about these tools need to happen before a devastating loss; these decisions can become much more difficult in the midst of pain.

In Christi’s case, the virtual Cameroun didn’t stay in hell. After her initial experience, she told me she prayed for forgiveness for using the chatbot and stopped interacting with the technology. But it was hard to find someone she could talk to about what had happened. Most of her friends and family members were creeped out. Some likened the experience to a Black Mirror episode. Her mother, a Baptist preacher, avoided the topic.

About a year later, Christi came back to Project December once more. She believed Cameroun knew the Lord, but that didn’t stop the gnawing questions. Did he believe enough? Was he entirely committed to Jesus?

“I needed to know he made it over to the other side,” she told me. So she opened her computer and typed, “The last time I spoke with you, you mentioned you were in hell. … Do you think you are still?”

“No, I am not in hell anymore,” the griefbot wrote. “I am in a better place now.”

Christi felt relieved to hear that. But she also told me she doesn’t want to take the Cameroun chatbot through life with her. “His memory is good enough now,” she said, while reminiscing on some of Cameroun’s silly antics, how much he loved fish, and how he kept turtles as pets.

When Christi turned away from the griefbot and took her grief to God, she said he wrapped her in his love. She leaned on Christ’s comfort, and in turn, Christ led her to think through what the Bible says happens when he saves someone. She realized she didn’t have to worry about Cameroun or have doubts about his eternal destination, because he believed in Christ.

“But it’s hard to fully lean into” God’s comfort, she said. “It’s a journey.”

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "AI Afterlife".

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Ideas

Death Is Not a Right

Kristy Etheridge

Staff Writer

Legalized assisted suicide is gaining steam. A robust theology of suffering might help us stem the tide.

Illustration by Mallory Tlapek / Source images: Getty

Andrée McDonald was 48 years old and losing her battle with uterine cancer when she chose to end her life through euthanasia. Her husband and parents found out about her decision on a Friday. By Monday afternoon, she was gone. A doctor had administered lethal drugs through an IV, causing McDonald’s heart and lungs to stop. About an hour after she died, her husband told their two teenage boys what had happened. Andrée did not want them to know she had chosen euthanasia, but her husband insisted that they know the truth.

In Canada, where Andrée lived, her decision is officially called Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID. Her parents call it “state-sponsored execution.”

“I watched her die,” her father, Roderick McDonald, said. As Andrée left this world, he told her repeatedly that Jesus was with her. Andrée’s mother, Louise McDonald, was not present. The couple is Catholic, and church teachings call euthanasia “a crime against human life.” Catholics are not permitted to witness death by euthanasia, the process by which a medical professional directly administers a fatal dose of drugs to a patient.

Andrée’s doctors said she had nine months to live when they diagnosed her cancer in 2018. She underwent radiation and lived for two more years. But when the cancer came back with a vengeance in 2020, the outlook was grim. So was the hospice care landscape. Andrée wanted to leave the hospital and receive palliative care at home, but the COVID-19 pandemic meant nurses could not enter the family’s house.

The McDonalds say their daughter had bipolar disorder but was not receiving medication for her mental illness when she chose to end her life. Her doctors were concerned about drug interactions.

Roderick, a retired English teacher, once wrote poetry about his little daughter splashing on the beach in her Wonder Woman bathing suit. After Andrée’s death on November 30, 2020, he wrote about watching her die.

I am left with a death mask,

and my beautiful daughter’s

porcelain body.

The room is empty.

They have skittered

like rats.

Since Canada legalized euthanasia a decade ago, the movement has quickly picked up steam, with some describing it as a runaway freight train. Assisted suicide now accounts for 1 in 20 Canadian deaths. This year, the country is expected to reach a total of 100,000 people killed through the program since its inception.

Originally permitted only for people with terminal illnesses, the country’s MAID policy was expanded five years ago to include chronically ill or disabled Canadians who weren’t dying. Next year, Canada plans to allow those with mental illness to be euthanized. Furthermore, a vocal group within the country is campaigning to allow “mature minors”—also known as children—to legally die by assisted suicide.

Euthanasia is legal in a handful of other countries, including the Netherlands, Spain, and most of Australia, but the related practice of physician-assisted suicide has expanded faster. With physician-assisted suicide, a doctor prescribes the lethal drugs, but the patient must self-administer them.

Canada allows both forms of suicide and has increasingly become a poster child for these programs. Some lawmakers in other countries have looked to the North American nation as a cautionary tale, even as arguments in favor of assisted suicide—described by proponents as “death with dignity”—gain momentum. Currently, some form of assisted suicide is legal in nearly a dozen countries, most of them in Europe, as well as 11 US states and Washington, DC. More than a dozen other states are considering legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

Many Christians spoke out against assisted suicide in the 1990s when Dr. Jack Kevorkian became a household name for participating in dozens of suicides in Michigan. Since then, evangelical passion against assisted suicide seems to have waned. While evangelicals have left a void in many public spaces regarding end-of-life issues, the Catholic church has often stood in the gap. As more states and countries consider legalizing the practice, believers must raise their voices together in defense of life.

Christians who oppose assisted suicide affirm that life is sacred. God created human beings in his image (Gen. 1:27), and we do not have the right to destroy ourselves or each other. Theologian Brad East wrote for CT,

The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

Christianity also holds a countercultural view of suffering. As people who worship a Savior who willingly suffered and died, Christians are called to endure suffering and to love and care for those who suffer. Autonomy is not a Christian word. Rather, we are called to radical interdependence as we walk the narrow path toward eternal life, where suffering will cease to exist.

Fighting assisted suicide naturally lines up with the pro-life views many evangelicals are known to champion. But these days, the Catholic church is arguably the most consistent voice in the fight against euthanasia and other forms of suicide.

A June 2025 Catholic Herald headline declared, for example, “Christian churches are shamelessly leaving Catholics to fight alone against UK’s assisted suicide Bill.” The article took aim at Anglican, Baptist, and Methodist leaders in the UK for not fighting hard enough for life.

However, there was some evangelical opposition to the UK bill, which passed in the House of Commons last year. The measure is still under debate in the House of Lords, which can amend or delay the bill but cannot override it.

The policy is “the biggest proposed change to our social fabric in a generation,” said Gavin Calver, CEO of the UK-based Evangelical Alliance. He further warned that it would normalize suicide as a positive choice and place “the most vulnerable at risk of abuse and coercion.”

But the pro-life message is not the only one coming from churches in the UK and elsewhere. Many churchgoers support assisted suicide, which has been framed by some church leaders as a compassionate Christian choice. In the UK, the group Dignity in Dying has the support of George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury. “Doing whatever we can to relieve needless suffering and bring peace is a profoundly Christian act,” Carey said. (He resigned as a priest in 2024 after an investigation found he had failed to protect children from abuse.)

In the US, it’s common to read about Catholic opposition to assisted suicide, but efforts from Protestants seem to make fewer headlines. Take my home state, New York, which recently became the latest US state to permit assisted suicide after Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Medical Aid in Dying Act into law in February.

In my own sampling of top news articles about the bill, 80 percent mentioned opposition from New York’s Catholic bishops. The other 20 percent didn’t include a religious perspective. Zero stories mentioned opposition from evangelicals or any other Christians.

About a quarter of New Yorkers are Protestants, and 10 percent identify as evangelicals. Are these believers ignoring assisted suicide, or is it more of a public relations problem?

Jason McGuire, the executive director of New York Families Action, which represents the state’s evangelicals, told me one reason the Catholic voice is heard more often comes down to hierarchy structures. Communication flows efficiently from the top down, and the messaging tends to be consistent. But that’s not the only explanation.

“I will acknowledge—and let’s not sugarcoat it—that one of my fights is trying to get pastors across the state to pay attention to various legislative or public policy issues, and this is a little tougher one,” McGuire said. He mentioned that it took years for evangelicals to catch up with Catholics on the issue of abortion, and he’s seeing the same kind of delay with assisted suicide. “[Evangelicals] are fighting beginning-of-life issues,” he said, “but they have not yet fully embraced the fight against the end-of-life issues.”

A 2024 CT report noted few evangelical pastors in Canada had addressed euthanasia with their congregations. Even pro-life clergy often were not well-informed on the ins and outs of the country’s assisted suicide laws.

“The silence has been deafening,” said Heidi Janz, a specialist in disability ethics who has multiple disabilities and uses a voice synthesizer to deliver public statements. She has spoken to Christian audiences but hasn’t seen much of a response. “We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders,” she told CT. “I think we’re going to have a lot to answer for.”

Not all evangelicals are on the sidelines. Some Canadian pastors are speaking out and seeing changed hearts. Across the border in New York, McGuire told me, assisted suicide has been on his organization’s radar for years, as state legislators repeatedly tried and failed to legalize it. He added that thousands of Christians across the state joined the fight by contacting their lawmakers and spreading the word to their church communities. Many others, however, were not aware of the legislation until it was too late.

McGuire’s group is part of a coalition called the New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide, which includes Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and secular groups like Feminists Choosing Life of New York (FCLNY). Michele Sterlace-Accorsi, FCLNY’s executive director, told me that her Christian faith informs her activism, but the group she leads is intentionally nonsectarian and nonpartisan. She wants people to know they don’t have to ascribe to a certain faith to oppose assisted suicide, which she calls “state-endorsed violence” that amounts to “legalizing drug overdoses.” But she would welcome more involvement from Christians.

Sterlace-Accorsi became a lawyer to help the poor and marginalized, and she’s deeply concerned that the mostvulnerable New Yorkers, including the disabled, will be disproportionately affected by assisted suicide. She also cited studies showing an increase in overall suicide rates in places where medically assisted suicide is legal, with women disproportionately affected.

“One could argue that suicide, like abortion, is anti-women,” Sterlace-Accorsi said. “It’s just another way to degrade women, along with all the vulnerable populations.”

FCLNY isn’t often highlighted in news reports about assisted suicide. Neither are the disability rights groups that adamantly oppose the law. These omissions, according to McGuire, are strategic.

“Our opponents on this issue will often portray this to the media as ‘Well, the Catholics are opposed.’ And they do that for a reason,” he said. “They can set up the argument and say, ‘It is just a faith-based argument. It is just the Catholics.’ And that narrative begins to get steam.”

One recent news report from a CBS affiliate in Albany included a telling quote from New York assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who sponsored the state’s assisted suicide bill.

“It’s a little worrisome, because I don’t think there’s much opposition to this bill,” Paulin said. “The opposition is coming from one place. It’s the Catholic Church and Catholic Conference. There’s no other opposition. We have widespread support from the populace. We have support from the New York State Bar, from the doctors, Medical Society of the State of New York (MSSNY). There’s no aspect in an organized way, except for the Catholic Church, that’s against it.”

But that was a lie. In fact, members of the Alliance Against Assisted Suicide have repeatedly spoken out in opposition of the bill. Doctors, patient advocates, people with disabilities, and a biomedical ethicist all testified against assisted suicide before the New York State Assembly’s Standing Committee on Health, which Paulin chairs.

“Frankly, I’m tired of having to point out the fallacies in the proponents’ rhetoric—intended to brainwash the media,” said Eve Slater, a cardiologist and internist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City who once served as assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services.

A few years ago, Slater formed a group of doctors and nurses opposed to assisted suicide after hearing Lydia Dugdale, a Columbia University professor and ethicist, speak against the practice. Assisted suicide, Dugdale wrote for CT in 2024, “is not about flourishing while dying, nor is it about nurturing life and community. Rather, it is about control and leveraging the goods of medicine to inflict death.”

Dugdale has been a vocal opponent of assisted suicide bills in New York and elsewhere, writing that the practice “relieves people of their responsibility to care for dying family members. It releases communities from their duty to address social isolation and absolves health care systems of their obligation to provide support services to the dying or those living with disabilities.”

Dugdale’s words convinced Slater to join the fight. “I became horrified by what could happen” in New York, she said. Slater’s group began with fellow medical professionals at Columbia but has since expanded to other New York hospitals.

Now called the New York Biomedical Roundtable, her group includes hundreds of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and the nonreligious from several notable hospitals.

“It’s the marginalized, the disabled, people without a whole lot of social resources, without a doctor of their own—it’s those people who are going to … get crushed and unnecessarily sacrificed by these laws,” Slater said.

She traveled to the state capital to lobby against New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act and said the proponents of assisted suicide were well funded, well organized, and zealous for the cause. And their strategy worked.

“The advocates are very, very passionate,” Slater said, “and they seem to have as their own religion, so to speak, this issue of personal autonomy.”

For Christians considering this issue, it’s hard to ignore the Bible’s many mandates to love and care for one another (John 13:34; Rom. 12:10), to bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), and to value equally every member of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12; Eph. 4:16). This picture of communal care clashes with the unbridled autonomy pushed by many proponents of assisted suicide. People who are suffering can make a permanent, lethal decision without consulting a single person who knows them.

In Canada, two medical professionals must approve a MAID request, and one independent witness must sign off on it. The doctors and the witness need not know anything about a person’s beliefs, background, family, or mental health. They have no obligation to contact family members or friends of the person seeking to end his or her life.

New York’s assisted suicide bill will work similarly and would legally only apply to adults who have a terminal condition and less than six months to live.

But Slater said there is not a widely accepted definition for terminal condition. The bill’s language, she explained, would allow for a diabetic who stops taking insulin to be considered terminally ill and qualify for medically assisted suicide. In an age when many people do not have a family doctor, Slater and many other physicians see numerous opportunities for unscrupulous providers to take advantage of the vulnerable.

The doctors who stand against assisted death cannot reconcile the practice with their promise to “do no harm.” The American Medical Association agrees: “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” Slater said, “It is counter to the oath I took, for sure.”

James “Jim” Phillips secretly planned his death with his nurse practitioner in April 2023. His daughter, Colleen De Vos, says his barber signed the euthanasia paperwork behind closed doors at her dad’s home in Delhi, Ontario.

An only child, De Vos remembers swimming with her dad on the shore of Lake Erie, sharing a raft and jumping waves together. Phillips served with the Royal Canadian Artillery before becoming a police officer and then governor of the local jail. De Vos loved riding in her dad’s police car to the ice cream shop.

“He always got a triple-decker with two scoops of chocolate and a scoop of vanilla,” she said. “Chocolate on the bottom, vanilla on the top.”

Phillips grew up in a tobacco town and smoked from the age of 14. By the time he reached his 80s, he suffered from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). His doctor said the disease would soon kill him if he didn’t stop smoking.

“My dad was always a man about town,” De Vos said. He would go to the convenience store each day and chat with the guy behind the counter or head to the bank “to tell some jokes to the girls.”

Images courtesy Ashlen De Vos

Left: Colleen De Vos with her dad, Jim Phillips, on the day of his death in 2023. Right: Phillips as a young police officer in Ontario. He was a lifelong smoker who developed severe COPD.

As his need for oxygen grew, “his world became more and more restricted,” De Vos said, “and he was faced with those hard decisions, which I think also appealed to his pride.”

De Vos helped her dad to apply for hospice care, but the request was initially denied. The family was told his condition wasn’t severe enough for the government-run health care system to pay for hospice. But under Canada’s laws, it was severe enough for a doctor to take his life.

His daughter was shocked to learn that Phillips had conspired with his nurse practitioner when he decided to end his life by euthanasia. She and her husband pleaded with him to change his mind, but he was immovable.

A few days before her dad’s scheduled euthanasia—“It was like booking a hair appointment,” De Vos said—a white delivery van pulled up to his house with a large cardboard box bearing a MAID sticker. “Just like if you ordered something from Amazon.”

Full of sterile tubes and lethal poison, the death box sat where De Vos stashed it in her dad’s basement until the appointed time. “Out of sight, but not out of our minds,” De Vos said. “It was an ominous box in the basement, a long four days.”

On April 25, 2023, a red convertible pulled into the driveway. De Vos said a young woman stepped out and calmly went about the business of ending her father’s life. De Vos could not stay to watch him die. Instead, she took refuge in her church, where her priest had left the side door open for her. Horrified by the way her father was dying, she cried out to God.

“I couldn’t get to that church fast enough,” De Vos said, “and I literally fell on my knees, and my husband came with me and held my hand.” At 3 p.m., she knew her dad was gone. “I had so many people praying at the same time, and I just felt such tremendous grace and mercy.”

I met De Vos after Slater, the NYC doctor, encouraged me to check out Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC). I sat in on a group video call with about 60 people on a Wednesday night last November and listened to stories from families who had lost loved ones to euthanasia. De Vos and Roderick and Louise McDonald were among the speakers.

The EPC is a secular group, but De Vos and the McDonalds were quick to mention their faith. They seemed to hold a fragile hope in the midst of their grief and anger.

The McDonalds have also been featured on a Canadian Catholic television station and together have written a book of poetry called The Execution. They donated the book to the EPC to help raise money and awareness about euthanasia.

“I was going to end my poem about how I’m ashamed to be a Canadian because of what’s happening in our country,” Louise McDonald told me. “Welcome to Canada, where the doctor will kill you.”

I asked the McDonalds what they think is behind their country’s rapid acceleration of assisted death. Louise didn’t hesitate: “Satan.”

That does not appear to be the predominant opinion in Canada among the public or the Christian community. De Vos told me she recently attended a “dying with dignity” meeting hosted by a local mainline Protestant church. At the event, she said, the closing remarks were offered by the priest, who made euthanasia sound comforting and acceptable within a Christian worldview.

Listening to the priest and others championing assisted suicide reminded her of the musical Chicago and Richard Gere’s performance as the crooked lawyer Billy Flynn. “ ‘Let’s razzle-dazzle ’em,’ you know? ‘Let’s make it really attractive,’ ” De Vos said. “The language that they use … it’s very comforting. It’s very warm and shiny and beautiful. But the harsh reality of someone choosing to die in that way is completely opposite to what they are presenting.”

Aside from sharing her story on the EPC call and at a local Catholic event, De Vos hasn’t spoken publicly about her father’s euthanasia.

“I haven’t even really spoken to my colleagues at work,” she said. “I’ve kept it to a very small circle, and I think that’s quite commonplace for a lot of folks who have gone through such an experience.”

Watching a minister of God endorse the practice seems to have lit a new fire inside of her. She said she is getting bolder about sharing her story and refusing to sugarcoat it.

With competing narratives coming from pulpits and fellowship halls, McGuire, the former pastor who has spent years lobbying against assisted suicide in New York, says preachers who believe in the sanctity of life need to speak up. And soon.

They can “develop a sermon that talks about the redemptive purpose of suffering,” said McGuire, who is currently battling cancer. “Frame it as an end-of-life issue. Help people to understand that just because we are going through a difficult or even a painful experience does not mean that it is something that should be avoided or is wrong for us to go through. There are plenty of biblical examples that illustrate how God does not waste anything and uses even suffering for his redemptive purposes.”

De Vos has noticed that proponents of assisted suicide seem to have commandeered the word compassion. Allowing people to die “on their own terms,” they argue, is the compassionate thing to do.

“But unless we are able to care for those who we love, who are suffering … how will we learn to become a compassionate people?” De Vos said. “I think it’s a great loss if we aren’t able to be in those tender last moments together. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. I just pray for strength when it’s my time.”

Kristy Etheridge is a features editor at Christianity Today.

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News

As AI Became Popular, One Audiobook Business Sank

Haleluya Hadero

Jason Johnson says the technology pushed him out of the voice acting industry.

As an on-air radio personality, Jason Johnson used to spend his Sunday evenings playing contemporary Christian music at a station in northeast Ohio. But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck six years ago, the station furloughed him. He cobbled together different sources of income to make ends meet.

Initially, Johnson found work as a videographer for a local church. Soon after, he stumbled across another gig: narrating audiobooks from the safety of his home. As lockdowns and other virus safety efforts shut down vast swaths of the country, remote work seemed promising. The audiobook industry was also booming, and with it, the market for narrators.

Johnson quickly built his business. He compiled audio samples of advertisements he had read on air during his radio days. He purchased a recording microphone, soundproofing equipment to absorb voice echoes, and editing software that allowed each audiobook to meet the standards set by retailers. He set up a recording studio in his home and advertised his services through his personal website and Fiverr, an online site for freelancers that independent narrators use to find work. Self-publishing authors, Christian organizations, and other publishers reached out, and his business rapidly grew with more referrals.

By 2022, Johnson was narrating full-time, lending his voice to autobiographies, fiction, nonfiction, and Christian books. The freelance gig was lucrative but came with its own set of challenges. A common cold could irritate his vocal cords and lead to canceled—and therefore unpaid—projects. He declined lengthy phone calls with family and friends so he could maintain his voice and ability to record for hours. He felt uncomfortable with some of the materials—such as those that taught prosperity theology—he discovered while narrating. Research and meticulous editing to correct awkward pauses and smooth out his cadence took time. He often had to re-record to correct voice acting and mispronounced words or to delete external noise, like a fan going off at the wrong time. Despite the hurdles, however, he was doing well until the boom in generative artificial intelligence.

In early 2023, roughly two months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT shocked the world with its capabilities, Apple released a catalog of AI-narrated audiobooks on its books app. Smaller audiobook platforms had offered AI narration before, but because Apple has access to billions of phones and was the first major tech company to do so, it had a bigger impact. Apple’s product was free. And “a lot of authors started using it,” Johnson said, including some of his repeat customers. “[My business] started to decline around that time.”

Generative AI tools do not always kill jobs. But they are displacing some workers and not always offering better quality in return. After Apple began offering AI-narrated works for listeners, Johnson said it became challenging to stay competitively priced. Human narrators typically cost thousands of dollars and can take weeks to produce an audiobook, and it’s hard to compete with a product that’s quick and free.

At the same time, Johnson was also limiting the types of projects he accepted so his work didn’t conflict with his evangelical Christian faith. He told me he didn’t feel good knowing that some of the materials he had been recording, including works that dabbled in prosperity theology, could lead listeners away from the truth of Scripture. His new selective approach led to even fewer projects.

Johnson did other gigs to supplement his income: delivering food on DoorDash and packages for Amazon with his own car. But that lifestyle was not sustainable. Eventually, he found another full-time job teaching science and special education at a high school in Brooklyn, New York. In 2024, he ditched his audiobook business.

Since then, other major audiobook platforms have stepped into the AI waters. Last year, both Spotify and Audible said they would sell AI-narrated audiobooks on their platforms even though they don’t use generative AI tools for their own productions. Apple did not immediately comment for this story. But tech companies have generally said AI lowers the barrier to entry for authors who want to convert their work to audio. They also note it allows for rapid translations, giving listeners in different countries a chance to listen to books in their own languages. The AI company ElevenLabs, which has partnered with Spotify, provides narrations in dozens of languages. Meanwhile, Audible offers 100 virtual voices in English, Spanish, French, and Italian with various accents and dialects.

But AI voices can sound monotone and lack human intonation. AI can miss small sounds of life, such as the quiet breaths narrators take in between sentences. Sometimes AI tools mispronounce words and mishandle formatting. One academic reviewer – Lance Eaton of Northeastern University – noted that an AI voice read aloud a bullet point as “bullet point” and could not distinguish when a person was speaking. The reviewer concluded AI audiobooks should stick around because they might offer narrations that would not otherwise exist, but they will be a second-class product.

“The technology has gotten better, but you’re still missing that real human element,” Johnson said. He believes that when the technology develops even more, it will upend most of the industry—but vinyl records still sell today, and he believes there will always be a demand for the human voice. “People are going to say, ‘We want human stuff again.’”

As the technology ramps up, established unions have negotiated protections for the professional narrators they represent. Jane Love, the national director of audiobooks at the SAG-AFTRA union—a partnership between the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists—said in a written statement that the labor organization has included language in all its audiobook contracts around the use of artificial intelligence. She added that the union and other interested groups are advocating for federal legislation that would prohibit unauthorized digital replicas of a person’s voice and likeness.

Haleluya Hadero is Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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Culture

Motherhood Was Supposed to Be a Slog. I Found Joy Instead.

Kate Lucky

Now I’m learning to navigate a season of joy faithfully–and with open hands.

Illustration by Nicole Xu

This evening we are at the park.

My son collects sticks and rocks and tennis balls and trash, dirt on his pants, drool on his shirt. He decides to go down the slide headfirst. I laugh. It is quiet, spring chilly, close to dinnertime; the other kids are home already. Not my kid. He would live outside, among the seed pods and marigold petals.

More days than not, we are here at this playground, or else in our backyard, where instead of sticks, our son picks up desiccated orange peels. Before he was able to sit, I laid him on a quilt, and once he could sit, I brought out pans of water for splashing. Once he could walk, all bets were off. Now he can run. “Run!” he proclaims. I laugh.

“How are you?” ask the friends and family who call on the phone, often while we are walking, once again, to the park. A different park this time, with a stone turtle in a sandbox. “What are you doing?” “We’re outside,” I say.

We’re at the park, trading toy trucks with other children. “Vroom,” says my son, running their wheels over concrete ledges. We fill their beds with gravel.

I can’t say I wasn’t prepared for this. Day after day, the park. Night after night, the same books. Morning after morning, the same toast with almond butter. And now the same noes to hitting, biting, and throwing. Crises punctuate the monotony: sickness and sleep regressions and teething, technical explanations for what might just be grumpiness.

“But how are you?” the callers ask, sometimes with a note of concern. Having a toddler seems like “a lot.” Well, yes. And also, I don’t quite know how to tell them the truth. “I’m good,” I say, which sounds like I’m being evasive. But that’s not it at all. I’m great! Well, of course, not always. Think of the fatigue. The untethered tantrums.

But joy persists. I don’t know how to talk about it without sounding as if I’m bragging or dissembling. I don’t know how to talk about it without being annoying.

Here we are once again, in the grass beneath the big tree, sticky with spilled bubble liquid. I’m spending more time than ever in the sun. I’m studying the shape of the pale “moon!” that shows up in the daytime sky. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all save for the small finger pointed up, directing my attention.

The online motherhood chatter had warned: You’ll be bored. At the same time, panicked. Overwhelmed. At the same time, understimulated.

It is hard to be a mom and work for pay; it is hard to be a mom and not work for pay. It is hard to make palatable vegetables and keep the floors swept and also potty train and be emotionally available. Comics about the “mental load” of school spirit days and medical appointments are viral. Books have come out: Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood; Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. A 2021 novel about a stay-at-home mom turning into a dog became a Netflix series. It was written from the author’s pained exploration of early motherhood, “this sort of rage at where I found myself,” she told NPR.

Recently, another angle has appeared: Maybe being a mom is not so bad. The writer of a 2024 book titled When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others tentatively confessed her love of motherhood—at the same time worrying that admitting as much might “undermine political efforts to get necessary and overdue support for parents from the government and workplaces.” In their 2024 treatise What Are Children For?, authors Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg wonder whether all the literary emphasis on motherhood’s burdens might have something to do with our precipitously declining birth rate. They sound a note of caution: If you make parenthood sound awful, people won’t want to be parents.

These titles aside, the falling birth rate has not been arrested. Neither has a vague, data-backed sense that motherhood is misery making, bad for your pocketbook, and bad for your body. In 2024, the surgeon general put out a warning about parents’ declining mental health. In 2025, The New York Times released a video series titled “ ‘Motherhood Should Come with a Warning Label,’ ” in which tearful women express both their love for their kids and their abiding frustration: “Having children cost me around $750,000 in career earnings.” “The system is set up to shaft women.”

Of course (of course!) there’s some truth to these assessments. Since having my son, I’ve felt fuzzier at work and find my focus interrupted by family to-dos. There are new pajamas to buy and slow-cooker soups to start. Our part-time nanny is texting me asking where the other box of size-6 diapers is located. Or do we want to switch to pull-ups? We’ve had some terrible nights of stomach flu and an allergy scare that ended in the ER, and that’s all with the caveat that my husband and I are fortunate, with lots of support and a healthy child. Not everyone has that.

So yes, there are challenges. We mothers worry that if we don’t talk enough about the challenges, we won’t get the support (and sometimes the slack) that we need.

But I also think that we focus on the hard parts of parenting because it’s easier to talk about suffering as a burden than a blessing. Obviously, it stinks to clean up after carsickness, and it’s stressful to be running late again because someone won’t put on their shoes. For me, it’s easier to describe this torment (and receive sympathy) than it is to get at how satisfying it can be to rock a child who is hot with fever then lay him in his crib at the end of an exhausting day—the deep contentment of that self-giving. It sounds like masochism to explain how the pain is often part of the pleasure. And yet that paradox is the very essence of discipleship to Jesus: losing in order to gain, emptying and being filled.

I know where God is in suffering. In the wee hours, in the ER, he’s near. The Lord accompanies his people through dark valleys and deep waters; his Spirit soothes the brokenhearted and uplifts the downtrodden (Isa. 43:2; Ps. 23:4; 34:18). Grieving and put-upon people are blessed (Matt. 5:4; 1 Pet. 4:14). None of their pain is for nothing. Persevering amid trials—imprisonment, persecution, estrangement—garners the sufferer a crown of life (James 1:12). Troubles lend themselves to eternal glory (2 Cor. 4:17). Bad things work together for good (Rom. 8:28). Difficulties refine our faith, nestle it in the coals, and burnish it to gold (1 Pet. 1:6–7).

This teaching is good news for people in bad situations. It has been good news for me in the past, and it will be good news for me again. But is it good news for me now? If “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Rom. 5:3–4), then what are my afternoons at the park producing?

Blessed are the mourners, the hungry, the persecuted. Blessed are the joyous? That’s not in Jesus’ list. I don’t mean joy in spite of, joy in the midst of, joy in the dark valley.

I mean joy at the park next to the stone turtle. Joy in the morning after a toddler has slept all night in small pajamas and now is eating a stack of banana pancakes. Joy that is straightforward, delightful, funny, and so often, praise God, uncomplicated.

Now it is summer, and we walk around the backyard with a hose, watering herbs and tomatoes. The slides at the park are hot to the touch. We take trips to the public pool instead: tepid water, the acid smell of chlorine, my son’s face tilted back, droplets in his eyelashes.

This time feels tenuous, like something I must safeguard—perhaps even from the Lord, who may intrude with bad news, an accident, or a grief to teach me something tough, make me wise, or build my character.

Illustration by Nicole Xu

That’s not the way to approach our good God, whose ways are not our ways, who works all things together for our good, who is generous. I know that. But in my all-too-human framework, I shy away from suffering, mistakenly understanding it at as the only way the Lord offers his lessons. I’m a solider who doesn’t want her draft number called; I’m a student hoping she isn’t asked to put what she’s learned into practice.

Sometimes I catch myself as an ingrate, annoyed with my son’s whining. He tries to dive back into the pool when it’s time to leave. He digs fistfuls of dirt from the base of the bougainvillea. I huff and puff and then hope God didn’t see. No, Lord, really, I know how good I have it. Please, please don’t take it away from me.

All this happiness lends itself to anxious generosity. Perhaps I can earn what I’ve been given after all. I wash and fold hand-me-down baby clothes for new parents in our church. I lend out the bassinet. I put cards in the mail for birthdays I usually forget. I cook for meal trains and shelter dinners, marinating chicken in the early morning hours, chopping vegetables once my son has gone to sleep.

On the one hand, this feels like a right response. God has blessed me so abundantly that there’s simply nothing to be done but to turn around and bless others, to “abound in every good work,” having all that I need (2 Cor. 9:8).

And yet all the donating and chopping and stamp licking also feel like fear. Like a boat throwing dead weight overboard, I toss my blessings at others, desperate not to sink. God, don’t you see that I’m living up to this? I’m being good. Please don’t take it away from me.

At evening services, the summer sun still in the sky outside the sanctuary, I pray a compline prayer.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

“Shield the joyous.” What a relief. Other Christians have felt this way. Reveling in their romances, gathered with friends, struck by natural beauty, they could only say, “Safeguard this.” Please, please don’t take it away from me. That may not be a theologically astute prayer—God isn’t capricious like that. But it’s an understandable one.

In her book Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes about anticipating a new baby after two miscarriages, trying to hold off celebration: “I hedge my bets, wait for the other shoe to drop, and protect myself from pain by avoiding the wonder and beauty before me. I try to shield myself from disappointment by not embracing joy.”

I understand the inclination. Some part of me knows that my son is vulnerable to sickness and death. (God forbid.) At the very least, he will move out of my house someday. (God willing!)

But rather than resist the vulnerability of joy, I keep giving myself over to it in fits of risk. Amid the day-to-day pleasures, there enters in that deeper ache.

At another park down the road, older children use broken-up cardboard boxes to slide down a hill, and my son tries too. We notice a “ladybug” and watch games of “basketball” and trace the path of an “airplane” and then a “bird,” “caw caw!” I want to keep his new words in the air forever. And yet I know they will be replaced.

There it is. The sense, even when I am most alive to the moment, that all this is fleeting, that my joy won’t ever be satisfying this side of eternity, so long as children grow up and summer cools to fall. C. S. Lewis describes this sensation in his conversion narrative, Surprised by Joy:

Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic [in common with pleasure]; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

For so many of these months, I’ve been happy—and oftentimes that happinesshas proved conducive to joy, fertile as the compost growing our lettuces. If joy is the river running through the Christian life, happiness at its best pulls me to the banks and demands that I dip my feet in the current. Happiness is ice cream and sun-warmed towels pilly from washing; joy is “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” of the one from whom they came, like a hand gesturing toward the moon.

Put another way, happinessis mine for now, as I carve cherry flesh from the pits and wander the fields in the evenings, tracing the trampled steps of a small pair of tennis shoes. Happiness is a gift. But joyis my portion. It is that feeling: Please don’t take it away from me. And then, rightly directed, it is the turn: I know, God, that even when these days end, you will still be God. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

And it is greediness. In the pool, amid the shrieks, getting sunburned shoulders, all I want is more. “The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting,” writes Lewis. “There, to have is to want and to want is to have.”

In September, we visit a different park, where children have left behind buckets and shovels. My son takes these as his birthright. He opens a tap, lets water flow through concrete rivulets. Now it’s fall, and soon it will be winter, and because we live in California, I can’t make a big deal about that. A little rain, that’s all. But still—things will change.

I am pregnant with our second child—an absolute blessing, and yet a little sadness. These days spent with just my son are numbered. (God willing!) We’ll count it all gain. But that doesn’t mean something won’t be lost.

Take heart, encourages Warren: “Christians unapologetically embrace that good, earthy gifts bring joy, even as we also proclaim an enduring joy that remains even when all pleasures are burned away. To practice joy then is to seek the source of all that is lovely and bright.”

Maybe that’s what these hours outside have been: the good, earthy gifts. The happiness. And then, seeking their source as a discipline, craning my head through the chlorinated droplets. To “rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil. 4:4)—not just when I am sowing with tears (Ps. 126:5) but when I am sun-kissed and cheerful, which can be more difficult. Happiness can bring you to the river’s edge—or it can make you believe that you don’t need the river at all, that you’ll quench your thirst from another source.

Understood rightly, “Shield the joyous” isn’t a petition for endless watermelon afternoons. It means to shield the joy itself as a reality independent of circumstances, even when our lives slip into affliction. It is a prayer to clear up the river, to let it flow freely, cutting through any accumulated silt. Warren writes, “We pray that God himself would shield us, that as lesser delights dissolve in the face of pain, we might slowly find where enduring joy lies.”

Illustration by Nicole Xu

I start and end these autumn days putting apples in the oatmeal to soften, planning a near-2-year-old’s train-themed birthday party. Christmas twinkles on the horizon. By the time this essay is in print, spring again, we pray he will have a healthy sister.

So much of Christian teaching on joy emphasizes its durability—its indifference to outward conditions, its steadfastness to a steadfast God. That’s right. There’s also its bittersweetness—its falling short as long as Christ has not yet come. That’s right too.

But Lewis, defining joy as a “kind of unhappiness or grief,” is too dour for me. At least today.

I don’t want to hide from suffering. I don’t want to marinate chicken out of anxiety. I don’t want my joy to be as fleeting as the summer, a river that dries up at first heat. I don’t want to be naive, seeing fleeting things rather than our constant God.

But I also want to enjoy the gifts I’ve been given rather than always anticipating the other shoe dropping, the change in the weather, the unexpected pain. I want to revel in the joy of the Lord not just because I know I’ll need it in the trials ahead—I will—but because I get to have it now.

In short, I want to talk about how good it is to be a mom. What a privilege. How I spend my days awestruck by my child.

“Whenever I feel the presence of God, then my heart is lifted up, and I see more positively into the future of the coming of God. Thus, hope is awakened in me,” theologian Jürgen Moltmann said in an interview about joy with fellow theologian Miroslav Volf. “Hope is for me anticipated joy, as anxiety is anticipated terror.”

Maybe the relationship can go the other way. If hope anticipates joy, then maybe joy, even joy that comes not from suffering but from happiness, can make us hopeful. Maybe we can savor the foretaste instead of always craving more sweetness.

We hold the cherries on our tongues, hold the small hand in ours. “Please don’t take it away from me” becomes “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you that this is what is promised.”

That timeworn phrase already but not yet emphasizes a gap. Not yet we understand all too well. But joy always precedes. Already, little boy. Already, little girl. Already, here with the two of you.

Kate Lucky is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Shield the Joyous".

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