I sat with the news this morning for longer than I should have. Smoke rising over Tehran. Residential buildings hit. Missiles over Israel. Families in Lebanon fleeing again. Oil tankers blocked in the Strait of Hormuz. Over a thousand civilians dead in less than two weeks, and the numbers climbing every day. The UN warning of toxic rain falling on cities. Three million people displaced from their homes.
I am not going to tell you who is right and who is wrong in this war. That is not what this post is for, and frankly the political and moral complexity of what is happening right now defies any honest attempt to reduce it to a simple verdict. People I respect deeply are looking at the same facts and reaching different conclusions. This is not the place for that conversation.
This post is for something more immediate. It is for the feeling in your chest when you scroll through the headlines. The low grade dread that has been sitting at the edge of your awareness for days. The question forming somewhere underneath the news and the opinions and the takes: where is God in this? Is He paying attention? Does it mean something? Should I be afraid?
I want to sit with those questions honestly, because I think a Christianity that only works when the world is stable is not the real thing.
The Disciples in the Storm
There is a scene in the Gospels I keep coming back to this week. The disciples are in a boat. A storm comes -- not a metaphorical storm, but a real one, the kind that experienced fishermen found genuinely threatening. The waves are coming over the sides. The boat is filling with water. And Jesus is asleep in the stern.
They wake Him up. And what they say is almost accusatory: Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?
I want you to notice that. They do not say: Lord, please calm the storm. They say: do you not care? The fear has become a theological question. The storm has raised a doubt about whether God is present and whether God is good. That is what storms do. That is what watching smoke rise over a city does. It raises the same question the disciples asked from a filling boat in the dark: does He see this? Does He care?
"He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, 'Quiet! Be still!' Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, 'Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?'"
Mark 4:39-40He was there the whole time. Not absent. Not indifferent. Present in the boat, even while they were convinced He was not paying attention. That is not a comfortable answer to the question of suffering. But it is the answer the text gives.
What Scripture Actually Says About Moments Like This
The Bible was not written during a period of global peace and stability. It was written during sieges and exiles and invasions and plagues. The people who wrote the Psalms knew what it was to watch their city burn. The prophets spoke into a world of competing empires and crushing military power and civilian populations caught between forces they could not control.
Which means that when Psalm 46 says God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble -- it was not written as a sentiment. It was written as a testimony by people who had needed that refuge when the trouble was very real.
"God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging."
Psalm 46:1-3Therefore we will not fear. Not: therefore nothing bad will happen. Not: therefore the war will end quickly and the civilians will be safe and the missiles will stop. Therefore we will not fear. Because the ground underneath the fear is not our circumstances. It is a God who does not change when circumstances do.
This Is Not the End of the Story
Every generation of believers has had a moment when the world seemed to be coming apart and the question arose whether God had lost control of it. The generation that watched Jerusalem fall. The generation that lived through the Black Death. The generation that watched two world wars consume their children. The generation that lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation for forty years.
None of those moments were the end of the story. Not because the suffering was not real -- it was, devastatingly so -- but because God story does not end in the middle. It ends in Revelation 21, with a city where there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain. Everything in between -- including everything on the news today -- is not the conclusion. It is the middle. The Author is still writing.
That does not mean we should be unmoved by what is happening. The deaths of civilians in Tehran and Tel Aviv and Beirut should grieve us. Three million people sleeping away from their homes should grieve us. The grief is the right response. But it is possible to grieve and to hold on at the same time. The Psalms do both in the same breath. That is what faith in a situation like this actually looks like.
What to Do When You Cannot Do Anything
Most of us cannot stop this war. We cannot protect the families in its path. We cannot make the missiles stop or the diplomats agree or the leaders listen. That helplessness is its own kind of suffering, and I do not want to minimise it.
But there are things we can do. We can pray, specifically, seriously, by name for the people caught in this. We can resist the pull toward dehumanising anyone, on any side, in our thoughts and our conversations. We can give to the organisations providing humanitarian relief on the ground. We can be present and honest with the people around us who are afraid.
And we can refuse to let the fear have the last word. Not by pretending we are not afraid. Not by performing a peace we do not feel. But by returning, again and again, to the God who was in the boat the whole time, the one who looks at the storm and says: quiet, be still.
Bring the News to God Today
Open whatever you have been reading or watching and bring it directly into your prayer. Not to analyse it or argue about it, but to lay it in front of the God who sees every city that is burning and every person who is afraid. Tell Him what you feel about it, including the fear, including the anger, including the helplessness. Then read Psalm 46 out loud, slowly, all the way to the end. Let the last verse land: "Be still, and know that I am God." That is not a call to passivity. It is a call to anchor yourself in the one who has not lost His footing, even when the world has lost its mind.
He Has Not Gone Anywhere
I want to close with the simplest thing I know how to say. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is the same God who is watching the Middle East right now. He is not surprised. He is not overwhelmed. He is not absent from the rubble in Tehran or the shelters in Israel or the displaced families in Lebanon. He is the God who enters the worst of what human history produces, who went all the way to a cross in the middle of an occupied city under the watch of an empire, and who does not leave people alone in it.
He has not gone anywhere. He is in the boat. And He is not asleep.
Father, I bring the broken world to You. I ask for peace where there is no peace, for shelter where there is no shelter, and for my own faith to hold when the headlines are heavy. You are still in the boat. In Jesus Name, Amen.
With honesty and hope,
Claire