After a US Apache helicopter was downed near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, the US completed strikes on Iran the next day. Iran responded on Wednesday by targeting US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan.
As of this writing, a return to full-scale war appears to remain more of a threat than an imminent reality. However, President Trump has also reiterated the need for the current talks to come to a quick solution, noting that Iran has taken too long already and would “have to pay the price” if they continue to delay. He went on to state, “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them again hard today.”
What will happen to the “ceasefire” is uncertain, but similar threats in the past have not produced a lasting agreement, and it’s unclear if today’s will yield a different outcome.
Now to a strange pivot: I was staying in a hotel room recently and noticed that the “art” on the walls looked like something my seven-year-old grandson could have painted. Splotches in random arrangement, intended, I suppose, to match the color scheme of the room, but depicting nothing specific.
I thought back to other hotel rooms I have experienced across recent years, recalling that they were all of the same genre. It’s been a long time since I stayed in a hotel room featuring art that depicted something I could recognize—a landscape, a pond, a sunrise, and so on.
By contrast, my wife and I recently took a trip to an art gallery featuring work we had recently discovered. The artist’s renderings of fields, bluebonnets, lakes, and rivers were so accurate as to be almost photographic. We brought some of it home; it draws me into the scene every time I stand before it.
Having taught art interpretation as part of my work in philosophy, I recognize the difference: abstract art invites us to identify our own meaning in what we see, to make sense of what seems random in whatever way makes sense to us. Accurate depictions of actual scenes, by contrast, invite us to experience what is already “there,” to join reality as it is.
I understand why the former is so much more popular than the latter these days. If your reality includes conflict in the Middle East that appears to have no end, partisan rancor that extends to basketball games, elections that elect candidates whose reported personal morality is unworthy of emulation, and continuing news of AI-generated extinction threats, you’d probably rather stare at paint blotches on a canvas and make of them what you wish.
But wishing reality was different doesn’t make it different.
The good news is that the God who rules the universe is still the “God of hope” who can “fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13).
But embracing such hope may take us places we did not expect along the way.
Standing guard on Borneo
In Deuteronomy 8, Moses explains to the Israelites preparing to enter the promised land, “[God] humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lᴏʀᴅ” (v. 3).
If God could provide manna in the wilderness, he could obviously have prevented the hunger he allowed the people to experience before providing it. Jesus could have similarly fed the five thousand families without enlisting the help of his disciples or a boy’s small lunch (John 6:5–9). He could likewise have kept Peter from sinking into the Sea of Galilee and from having to cry for help (Matthew 14:28–30).
When I was serving as a college missionary on the island of Borneo one summer, our team made our way to a village where we were scheduled to spend only the day due to its remote nature and inherent danger. But unexpected rains washed out the roads, requiring us to stay three days and two nights.
We were placed in the hut of the only man in the village with a gun. My missionary partner and I took turns sleeping while the other stayed awake and on guard. (I’m not sure what either of us would have done if we had actually faced danger, but at least we felt safer that way.) We obviously made it through the experience, but the God who is sovereign over the weather could just as obviously have prevented it.
You can undoubtedly list times in your life when the Lord could have prevented the challenges you faced but did not. To borrow a metaphor from Paul, he either removes our “thorn in the flesh” or he redeems it.
Paul experienced both. Sometimes he was spared from persecution, such as the time “the Jews plotted to kill him” in Damascus, but “his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket” (Acts 9:24–25). And sometimes he was not, such as the time he and Silas were beaten and imprisoned in Philippi before an earthquake miraculously released them (Acts 16:19–26).
Excellent advice I still need to remember
One of the ways God redeems all he allows is by using hardship to turn us from relying on ourselves to relying on him. The sicker we are, the more we will admit that we need a doctor.
But I would like to issue a protest. As a vocational minister who spends his days writing books and articles about and for God, I would like to claim that I need no such reminders; I already know I need to depend on the Lord for my life and work.
Here’s the catch: those who strive to be faithful Christians can become so reliant on our past experiences with God that we are not open to the next.
I read today in Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest this assertion: “The more you realize yourself the less you will seek God.” He asks, “Are you thirsty, or smugly indifferent—so satisfied with your experience that you want nothing more of God?”
Two days ago, he warned, “Beware of harking back to what you were once when God wants you to be something you have never been.” His admonition calls to mind some excellent advice I received when we launched this ministry in 2009.
My co-founder and I were eating breakfast with a longtime friend and supporter, discussing our plans for this new work. He told me something I’ve not forgotten: Don’t revert to what you know when God is calling you into something new.
His advice pointed to the fact that, under pressure, we all tend to revert to what we know, to what we have done well in the past, to those places and resources in which we have confidence born of success. But if God is calling us into a new chapter, the old chapter must be closed. If he is calling us to march into the flooded Jordan River, our previous experience with the Red Sea is no longer sufficient. If he is calling us westward into Macedonia, our missionary endeavors in the East are no longer our calling.
“Becoming what we are not yet”
Paul assured Christians facing persecution in Rome, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20), but that day had not yet come. One day our archenemy will be “thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur” (Revelation 20:10), but that day is not today.
Until time is no more and we are in paradise, we can count on “abstract art” days when our canvas is seemingly covered with random blotches of paint, inviting us to make our own “reality” out of them. Resist the temptation. Turn the challenge into reliance on God. Don’t revert to what you know when you’re called into something new.
In The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, Os Guinness writes:
“Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but of becoming what we are not yet but called by God to be.”
What are you “called by God to be” today?
