Dear friend,
I want you to stop what you are doing.
Put down whatever you are holding. Close whatever you have open. I need five minutes of your full attention this morning because what I am about to tell you is the most serious thing I have written since I started writing to you.
I have been in the Church for fifty years. I have watched wars begin. I have watched nations collapse. I have sat with men who lived through things that cannot be fully described to people who were not there. I am not a man who panics. I am not a man who uses dramatic language to get attention.
What I am about to say is not dramatic language.
It is a description of what is happening right now, this morning, while you are reading this.
Last night while you were sleeping the United States military struck over eighty targets inside Iran.
Not a warning shot. Eighty targets. In a single night.
Iran has responded by threatening what it calls a crushing response. The peace agreement that was announced just weeks ago — the one the president called an unconditional surrender — is now, in his own words this morning, over. He called the Iranian leadership scum. He said if they had a nuclear weapon they would use it.
Think about those words for a moment. The president of the United States, at a NATO summit in Turkey, saying that about a country his military struck eighty times last night.
The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly one fifth of all the oil in the world passes every single day — is now a battlefield. Ships are being attacked. Kuwait intercepted ballistic missiles and drones this morning while its citizens were waking up. Oil prices surged five percent before most Americans had finished their first cup of coffee.
Your grocery bill. Your gas prices. The young men in your family. The stability of everything you depend on every single day.
This is not happening somewhere abstract. This is happening to the world your children and grandchildren are going to inherit. And it escalated overnight.
Now I want to tell you something that most people will not tell you.
I am not surprised.
Not because I am cold. Not because I do not feel the weight of what I just described. But because I have been reading about this morning for fifty years.
It is in the Book.
In Matthew chapter 24 the disciples sat down with Jesus and asked Him a direct question. What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?
He did not change the subject. He did not soften the answer. He looked at them and He described what was coming in plain language.
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.
Stop there for a moment.
Nation rising against nation. Kingdom against kingdom. The United States striking Iran. Iran striking back. Kuwait intercepted missiles this morning. Oil prices surging. The Strait of Hormuz on fire.
Jesus described this morning two thousand years before it happened.
But here is the part that should make you sit down if you are not already sitting.
He said — these are the beginning of birth pains.
The beginning.
Not the middle. Not the end. The beginning.
I want you to understand what birth pains feel like from the inside.
They are overwhelming. They come in waves. Each one feels like it might not end. The person going through them cannot see what is coming. They can only feel the present moment and trust that the process has a purpose beyond what they can see right now.
And here is the terrifying part.
Birth pains always get worse before they end. That is not a theological opinion. That is how birth works. The intensity increases. The waves come faster. The pain becomes almost unbearable right before the breakthrough.
If what we are watching right now is the beginning of birth pains — and I believe with everything in me that it is — then what comes next will be harder than what we are watching today.
I am not saying that to frighten you without purpose. I am saying it because you deserve to know the truth. Because you deserve to walk into what is coming with your eyes open rather than being blindsided by it. Because the people who understand what is happening are the ones who do not lose their faith when it gets worse.
And it may get worse.
But I also need to tell you this.
Birth pains end.
They always end. And what comes after them is not death. It is life. It is the thing that the entire painful process was building toward.
In Daniel chapter 2, God showed King Nebuchadnezzar a vision of every kingdom that would ever rise and fall. Empire after empire. War after war. Nation after nation. And at the end of all of it — not the kingdoms, not the missiles, not the oil tankers burning in the Strait of Hormuz — a stone not cut by human hands that struck the statue of these kingdoms and shattered it. And that stone became a mountain that filled the whole earth.
Every kingdom rises. Every kingdom falls. Iran will fall. Every power arrayed against God's people will fall. On a timeline only God can see. Moving toward an ending only God has already written.
That is not wishful thinking. That is the promise of the Book that has never once been wrong about anything it described in advance.
I want you to hold one more thing before I close.
In the middle of all of this — the strikes, the collapsing ceasefire, the missiles, the oil prices, the NATO summit, the world that feels like it is accelerating toward something nobody can fully name — there is one man standing at the centre of it. Being asked to make decisions that will affect every person reading this letter. Being attacked from every direction including from within his own party. Being called a betrayer by people who were supposed to be on his side. And still standing.
I have written about this pattern before. The chosen man. The impossible moment. The opposition from every direction. The survival that cannot be explained by anything other than God's hand.
I wrote it all down in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. I wrote it for mornings exactly like this one. When the world feels like it is spinning off its axis and you need something Biblical to hold onto that makes sense of what you are watching. Read it this week. It will not make the news less serious. But it will make it less terrifying. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it by clicking on this link: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I want to close with the verse I read this morning before I knew what the news would bring.
Psalm 46, verse 1.
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.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth give way.
The earth is giving way this morning. That is not a metaphor today. Ships are burning in the Strait of Hormuz. Missiles are being intercepted over Kuwait. The president of the United States is at a NATO summit calling the leaders of Iran scum and saying the peace is over.
The earth is giving way.
And yet.
God is our refuge. He was our refuge before this morning's news. He will be our refuge after whatever comes next. He has not been surprised by a single thing that happened overnight. He is not wringing His hands at a NATO summit trying to figure out what to do. He is on His throne. Exactly where He has always been. Exactly where He will always be.
Do not be afraid, friend. Be watchful. Be prayerful. Hold your family close tonight.
But do not be afraid.
God bless you. I mean that more than usual this morning.
With you in prayer,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read Matthew chapter 24, verses 1 through 14 today. Read it slowly. Let it reframe what you are watching from chaos into pattern. The chaos does not get less serious. But it gets less surprising. And less surprising means less terrifying.
Two. Read Psalm 46 out loud today. All twelve verses. Out loud, not silently. There is something about saying the words — God is our refuge and strength — that settles something in the body that reading quietly does not reach. Do it once today and once before you sleep tonight.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it for mornings exactly like this one. The pattern it describes is not abstract today. It is unfolding in real time in the Strait of Hormuz and at a NATO summit in Turkey. Read it before the week is out.