My friends,
I imagine you with your coffee. Maybe the house is quiet. Maybe the grandchildren are still asleep down the hall. Maybe you are sitting alone, the way a person sits when they have something heavy on their mind and no one around who would understand.
I am glad you opened this. I have been thinking about you this week.
Before I go any further, I want to share something I believe will help you — not just today, but in the weeks ahead. Many of you have written to me saying the same thing: something feels like it is building, and you do not know what to make of it. I put together a guide called The Signs Are Here to help you understand what Scripture actually says about this moment in history. It has brought a great deal of peace to the people in this community who have read it. You can find it below. Now let me get into today’s letter.
What To Do When the World No Longer Feels Like Home
I want to talk to you today about something I do not think you hear addressed very often.
You feel like a stranger.
Not in a foreign country. In your own home. In your own family. In your own nation.
The things you were raised to believe are now called dangerous. The values you passed down to your children are now being quietly — or not so quietly — mocked. You turn on the television and the world that appears on the screen does not look like anything you recognize. And sometimes, in the quietest moments, you wonder: did I get something wrong? Am I on the wrong side of history?
I want to tell you something clearly, and I want you to hear it as if I am sitting across from you at the kitchen table.
You are not on the wrong side of history. You are on the right side of eternity. Those are not the same thing.
There is a letter in the New Testament that I return to often when I feel the weight of this. First Peter, chapter two, verse eleven. The Apostle Peter is writing to ordinary believers who are scattered, displaced, living under a government that does not share their values, surrounded by a culture that does not understand them. And he calls them something remarkable.
He calls them strangers and pilgrims.
Not victims. Not the defeated. Strangers and pilgrims.
A pilgrim is not a person who is lost. A pilgrim is a person who knows exactly where they are going. They are simply not there yet. The road is long. The road is sometimes hostile. But the destination is certain.
Peter does not tell these people to fight harder or despair louder. He tells them to keep their conduct honourable among the people who misunderstand them. To live in such a way that even those who speak against them will one day have to acknowledge the good they saw.
That is not weakness. That is a different kind of strength. It is the strength of a man who does not need the approval of the world because he already knows whose approval he has.
I have sat with a great many people in my fifty years in the Church. I have sat with people on their deathbeds. I have sat with parents who watched their children walk away from the faith. I have sat with men and women who felt completely alone in their convictions.
Not one of them, at the end, wished they had cared more about what the world thought of them.
Every single one of them wished they had cared less.
This week I received a note from a woman in this community. She did not give me permission to share her name, so I will not. But she wrote something I have not been able to stop thinking about. She said: Father, I feel like I am watching everything I love be dismantled piece by piece, and no one around me seems to notice or care.
I read that and I sat with it for a long time.
Because I think many of you feel exactly the same thing. And I want you to know that grief is not weakness. That ache you feel is not confusion. It is love. You grieve what you love. And what you love — your faith, your family, your country, the world your children were supposed to inherit — those things are worth grieving.
But grief is not the end of the story.
In the Book of Habakkuk — a prophet not many people spend time with — there is a moment that has stayed with me my whole life. Habakkuk is looking at his nation. He sees corruption. He sees injustice. He sees the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering. And he brings it directly to God. He does not dress it up. He does not soften it. He says, in chapter one, verse two: How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?
That is one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture.
And God does not rebuke him for asking it. God answers him. Not by explaining everything. But by telling Habakkuk to write down the vision. Make it plain. Because even though it feels far away, it is coming. It will not be late.
Though it linger, wait for it. It will certainly come and will not delay. Habakkuk chapter two, verse three.
That is the posture I want to leave you with this morning.
Not rage. Not despair. Not resignation.
Waiting with purpose. Watching with faith. Living as though the vision is coming — because it is.
Before you leave this letter, I want to give you something to carry into your week.
Here are five things I am asking you to do this week. Not because you have to. Because I think they will help.
One. Read First Peter chapter two this week. All of it. Read it slowly. Read it as a letter written to you, in your specific moment, by someone who understood displacement and still chose hope.
Two. The next time you feel the grief of watching the world change, name it as love. Say it out loud if you need to. I grieve this because I love what it was. That reframe is not small. It matters.
Three. Find one person in your life this week — one person — who is carrying something heavy. You do not need to fix it. You just need to sit with them the way you have needed someone to sit with you. That is ministry. That is what it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.
Four. Write down one thing you believe that the world calls foolish. Just one. Put it on a piece of paper. Keep it somewhere you can see it. Let it remind you that you are not confused. You are convicted. There is a difference.
Five. If the signs of the times have been weighing on you — if you have been looking at the news and the world and wondering what Scripture actually says about this moment — I want you to look at what I put together here. Not because I want to alarm you. Because I believe understanding brings peace, and peace is what you deserve going into this week.
God bless you this Sunday.
You are not alone. You are not forgotten. You are not on the wrong side.
You are a pilgrim. And pilgrims always find their way home.
With love and prayer,
— Father Thomas