Afghanistan: You may have heard some things this week. And regardless of where you are on the political opinion side of things, we can all agree that what the people there are facing, particularly our brothers and sisters in Christ, is gut-wrenching. There are several things going on that we won’t be able to cover easily here in this one or two paragraphs, but here’s a couple things:

The Taliban are now going door-to-door taking women and children. The specifics and the rest of what’s going on are perhaps too grizzly for this newsletter. Suffice it to say that they are suffering horrendously at this Taliban resurgence.

And the Taliban has a hit list of known Christians they are pursuing and killing. And with no U.S. Embassy there now, there is no good place for them to flee to.

God often uses these types of things, paradoxically, to grow the church. This is a hard thing for us to grasp, understand, or even, in our flesh, to agree with God about. We can and should pray for God’s mercy. But we should also pray for the strength of these Christians — these martyrs and potential martyrs — as they live out the gospel in a very real, gritty way.