We ought to walk through suffering so that a watching world recognizes that there is no good reason why we should have the hope we have. The peace we have. The continued joy we have. Not in a fire like that. And though they might not yet be able to identify with clarity the reason why, though the One who is with us might seem to be hazy and different, they will nevertheless recognize the presence of the “fourth” – someone that is making all the difference in the fire.

Trouble? Anxiety? Pain? Disappointment? Suffering?
These are all part of the human experience, and Christians are not immune to them. Though we are sometimes surprised when our lives take turns into the difficult, we really shouldn’t be – after all, Jesus told us it would be like this:
“In this world you will have trouble….” he said (John 16:33), and he was telling the truth. In some ways, this is really what life is about – it’s moving from difficulty to difficulty; in fact, these events are things that mark our lives into segments. They are the dividing points – there was life before the cancer, and after it; life before the job loss, and after it; life before the argument, and after it. And all of these things are painful to varying degrees.
Painful, yes – but also redemptive. Though it’s hard to see and accept in the moment, there is indeed redemptive purpose in the pain. Sometimes the redemptive purpose is in us, as God uses these things to sharpen our hope and refocus our gaze on the things that matter and are eternal. Sometimes the redemptive purpose is through us because these difficulties, when we are faithful in and through them, become powerful evidence of our faith to the world around us.
So what is it that we want the world to see when it sees a Christian suffer?
Many things, but perhaps an illustration might help. Think back to one of the most familiar stories from the Old Testament. It’s a story about faith. About standing against idolatry. It’s about courage. It’s about God’s faithfulness. And it’s also about what we want the world to see when we suffer as Christians.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood before the gigantic golden statue the king of the foreign land had erected in his own honor.
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When God chose to remake the world, he only preserved males and females because those two exhausted the gender categories of both humans and animals. The reason behind this decision seems consistent with the reason found in the initial creation of Genesis: The gender binary was directly tied to procreation. Only a male and female (no more and no less) are needed to be fruitful and multiply.

There’s a trendy new idea that denies God created only two genders (male and female). What’s the proof? Frogs. That’s right. Proponents of this view claim frogs are evidence that the gender binary of the Bible is a myth. If you’re puzzled by this, that’s understandable. Here’s how the argument works.
Defenders of this position point out that in Genesis 1, Scripture says God made creatures that live on the land and creatures that swim in the water. Frogs, however, are amphibians and aren’t exclusively land or water creatures. They don’t fit neatly in either of those creature classifications. So, although Genesis describes the creation of land and water creatures, it does not account for every kind of animal that God made.
In the same way, so the argument goes, even though Scripture says that God made humans “male and female” (Gen. 1:27), those two categories can’t account for every kind of human. God also created non-binary people—those who aren’t either male or female.
Now, there is some truth to what is being said. Many of the binary categories mentioned in the Genesis narrative don’t fully account for everything that’s created. For example, the Bible says God made day and night—allegedly the only two categories during a 24-hour period—but there’s also sunrise, sunset, dusk, and dawn that are neither day nor night.
Notice, however, in those cases (land/sea creatures, night/day), Scripture later references some of the natural variations between these binary extremes. For example, the Bible mentions frogs over a dozen times, acknowledging the existence of animals that are neither land nor sea creatures. Scripture also references dawn and twilight, even though they don’t fit the binary category of day and night.
This, however, is not the case with the binary category of male and female described in Genesis. There is never a later scriptural reference to another kind of human that falls outside the binary male-female gender category. If humans were made that were neither male nor female, why doesn’t Scripture say so?
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Millions of girls with instant access to our culture’s most viral (and dangerous) behaviors and beliefs are currently manifesting the results. Their sicknesses are a clear sign that our society is sick. In order to treat them and us, we’ll have to admit how the disease spreads, admit the connection between mental illness and gender confusion, and keep them away from clinics and smartphone apps where the disease is celebrated. 

One of the strangest stories of the last couple of years is how teenage girls have been stricken with facial tics after browsing the video-sharing app TikTok. Earlier this month, Azeen Ghorayshi published a deep dive on the strange phenomenon in The New York Times. Looking back at the puzzling explosion of TikTok tics during the pandemic, she reported that contagious outbreaks of strange behavior are not new and have a technical name: “mass psychogenic illness.”  
For example, long before TikTok, back in 2011, 18 girls at a high school in Le Roy, New York, broke into twitches and head snapping after one of their peers suffered a sudden spasm. The incident became a legend in medical literature. History is full of stories of patients, “mostly women,” who seemed to catch “tremors, seizures, paralysis, and even blindness” from each other like contagious diseases. Such mass psychogenic events used to be limited to real-life social circles, but social media has “dissolved the boundaries” that once kept outbreaks “geographically contained.” Now anyone with a smartphone can “catch” such behaviors.  
Most interesting about Ghorayshi’s piece is the correlation between social media-induced mental illnesses and LGBT identities. In fact, she wrote, doctors at a recent conference in Switzerland admitted that “a surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary.” Neurologists also told her that a “disproportionate number of gender-diverse adolescents” have developed “sudden tics.” 
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