Today, one of the wildest of the year, with Babet flexing her muscles, is a Day for Prayer for the Middle East. The doors of our church building are open from 10am-4pm to allow people to call in and spend some time in prayer, calling on God to have mercy and intervene in the horror that has been visited on humanity in the Middle East. It is hard to know what to pray for and the call from Christians, right there on the ground in Israel and Gaza, is that they too would know what to pray for. Here, the words of the Psalmist are apposite, “ When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

Trying to unravel the truth from this the most complex of religious geo-political ideological issues is almost impossible. I have been listening to a number of voices: Melanie Phillips, Bari Wies, Owen Jones, Ben Shapiro, Noam Chomsky and others. I have read again parts of Robert Fisk’s “The great war for civilisation”, Simon Schama’s “The story of the Jews” and Jeremy Bowen’s “Six days”. I know I have only scraped the surface and I will never get to the bottom. Fisk describes it aptly “The narrative of events – both through Arab and Israeli eyes and through the often-biased reporting and commentaries of journalists and historians since 1948 – now forms libraries of information and disinformation through which the reader may wander with incredulity and exhaustion”. But it isn’t enough just to give up and go to bed, or as some would say, “Don’t worry Jesus will return soon”.  Somehow it demands some form of judgement and a making up of a mind.

In my mind, the conflict between Israel and Hamas is asymmetrical, not just in terms of military power, but in terms of morality. Both sides live and fight by different rules.  The warfare is also total. One side will never be satisfied until the other is destroyed and wiped off the face of the earth. In that bleak reality there can be no compromise or peace deal no matter how hard the movers and shakers in the world try and the only possible solution, horrible as it may seem is for one side to have the complete victory. For the sake of Western Civilisation, as we have known it, the victor, in my view, has to be Israel.  The alternative is an irrevocable slide into a chasm of barbarism. But that is just me.

So, we spent a good part of the time today, with the newspaper spread out in front of us, reading from Scripture: the Psalms, Isaiah and the gospels and seeking what we should be praying for.

We prayed for those who have been given the authority and the power to influence and intervene: for Netanyahu Biden and Sunak, for Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, King Abdullah, Najib Mikati, King Salman, Basshar al-Assad and Ali Khamenei. We were remembering how God used pagan rulers in the past for his purposes. We prayed for those who could find no comfort after the savage and brutal hacking down of their loved ones and those in captivity, for the families living in terror of each new explosion in the night, for those piteously oppressed, for those deprived of food water and medical treatment. We prayed against evil in all its forms. We prayed for a miracle and for miracles in the darkest of situations and we prayed for the Gospel the only true answer for all humanity, to be heard and believed.

By the afternoon, storm Babet was asserting her power with increasing anger and so we retreated and cut short the day earlier than planned, while leaving it all in the safe hands of God, whose voice controlled the winds and the waves and who “makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. who breaks the bow and shatters the spear; who burns the shields with fire.