I'm writing from Nazareth today with a burdened heart. When we founded the Nazareth Center for Peace Studies, we carried a stubborn kind of hope. The kind that doesn't need good news to survive. We still carry it. But it's getting heavier.

Three consecutive years of war:  Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and now another war that feels like it's pulling in the whole Middle East. The same pattern repeats: missiles falling on homes, lives lost, families displaced, trauma that stays long after the sirens stop. Schools close. Flights are canceled. Church gatherings stop. Those who have shelters stay close to them. Many don't, and they are not safe.

There's a particular exhaustion that sets in when crisis stops being an interruption and becomes routine. The fear and uncertainty don't disappear; they settle in quietly, like something permanent.

Somewhere along the way, I gave up optimism. Not faith, but the easy hopefulness that assumes things will improve because they should.

What took its place was anger. Not rage or bitterness, but the refusal to see children killed, schools bombed, communities ground down by years of war, and call it acceptable. This is wrong. I will not make peace with it. And I will not make peace with the words that dress it up: the language that invokes God's name to justify violence, the theologies that confuse conquest with calling, and the silence of those who could speak but don't.

We often think of hope as something soft, a wish, a feeling, or a quiet confidence. A saying long attributed to Augustine captures something truer. Hope, it goes, has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage. Anger at the way things are. Courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

I read that and realized my anger was not a failure of faith. It was faith, refusing to accept what it saw.

This is not the hope we were taught to admire. This hope has teeth.

Its first daughter looks at the world and refuses to accept what is wrong. Its second daughter is the stubborn resolve that says: I will act anyway. That is the hope that keeps us working from Nazareth. It’s fierce, facing outward, toward a world that needs to change and a kingdom that is coming.

But there are days when Augustine's daughters are not enough.

There are mornings when the courage is thin and the anger has burned out. When the news is relentless and the grief is heavy and nothing changes. You show up anyway. Not because you feel you have something to give, but because you don't know what else to do.

Paul sees something in that showing up. He writes: "We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame." (Romans 5:3–5)

The days that feel fruitless are not wasted. The mornings we show up heavy, the prayers that seem to vanish into silence, the work that moves slower than the need. God is forming something through the exhaustion itself.

Augustine's hope faces outward: it gets angry, it acts. Paul's hope is forged inward: slowly and painfully, inside the person who endures.

Together, they name the hope I hold.

I have stopped calling it optimism. What I have now is stubborn hope. Forged in fire, fierce enough to act, deep enough to endure.

We work from the town where Jesus grew up, walked, and served. On the hard days, we trust that He walks with us, that faithfulness endures even without visible fruit, and that our sovereign God is at work in what we cannot see.

Pray for the families grieving on all sides. Pray for the Church in the Middle East, that it finds the strength to remain and to witness.

Peacebuilding is worth doing even when peace doesn't come.  

Come, Prince of Peace.