Yes, I know, this title doesn’t make sense. An island cannot face the sea.

And yet that is the vague feeling that sometimes came over me after spending a few days on the NEST campus in Beirut. It is an image which, beyond the immediate experience here, could or ought to apply to the Church.

Firstly, because every morning, from the window, you see it, right nearby, like an image that’s too still, always the same, like a desktop background. It’s a sight we witness every morning, but whose gentleness and calm create a glitch in the brain, because it conveys the opposite of the reality you experience in the country and the region.

Yet this island is not lost in the midst of an ocean that is apparently, but deceptively, calm, whilst in reality it is more than often turbulent. It faces the ocean. It is not the ocean (cf. John 15:19 and 17:16). It cannot truly confront it. Yet it does not allow to be completely encircled. It looks at it, observes it, studies it, makes use of it, and gauges its true nature. The island becomes aware of its own solid foundations and considers its own strengths and resources to live alongside it.

Because the NEST is a virtually self-sufficient entity within the neighbourhood. You don’t have to leave it; everything you need is provided, and you can have anything else you need delivered. You can play sport there, do your washing, cook meals to your own taste, organise parties, host well-known speakers in front of hundreds of people, or take refuge in a bunker… A church service is even held here every Sunday and livestreamed …

Because the NEST is a community that renews itself at the start of every academic year and goes to great lengths to nurture the bonds between students, lecturers, staff, and short- and long-term residents.

Because outside, this week, the narrow, one-way street on which the NEST is located was a one traffic jam for two days. Taking advantage of the parliamentary debate on the 2027 draft budget, army veterans blocked the city centre two kilometres from here to demand the fulfilment of a government promise: to increase the pensions of professional soldiers by restoring part of their value to pre-2019 financial collapse levels. Currently, their pension stands at six hundred dollars a month, which is far from enough to live on. Traffic in the city centre was completely disrupted for several hours each day, but the whole affair unfolded in a calm and peaceful manner. The issue of the army is highly sensitive due to the incessant bombardments, the encroachment on sovereign territory, the violation of international borders, and the bombing of facilities and entire hills in the south of the country by Israel, all of which continue amidst general international indifference and inaction. When Lebanese soldiers finally entered a threatened town the other day, some residents welcomed them with flowers and threw rice at them as one does during major celebrations.

But here in the neighbourhood, this does not disrupt the daily routines of staff, residents and businesses. People watch, chat and smile a little. And they get on with things. The residents’ ability to carry on living peacefully amidst chronic instability is astonishing: it’s simply what they’re used to. They’re used to hearing broken promises, unrealistic plans, shaky deals and kickbacks, all in the name of reinventing and preserving, to some extent, a certain social peace with a new balance. I would call this a patience born of transience and fragility. It rejoices in every respite; it is neither disillusioned nor cynical, but restrained, scaled back – a long-suffering patience. It also rests on the assurance of family, neighbourhood or community solidarity that kicks in when the going gets tough. A few months ago, I attended the end-of-year ceremony here at a leading Protestant school. The students brilliantly staged the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and then before Pilate. Speaking after the performance, the director told them, in essence: ‘This story of Jesus tells us in its own way: do not expect justice from politics’.

During the service to mark the start of the semester at NEST, looking back over the past eight months, the reality of life in Lebanon was neither glossed over nor trivialised, let alone regarded as inevitably normal: ‘so many losses, and perhaps a glimmer of hope… time alone does not heal these wounds. It requires a process, which begins with acknowledging the wrongs committed, and ends only with restoration and reparation”.

NEST, just like the Church, is sometimes like an island facing the sea: we are somewhat sheltered. But above all, we can build a community there that reflects, discusses, meditates and reads together about this reality, alongside the promise of a present lived in the presence of God—He who nurtures in each of us a spark of goodness to bring the concrete reality, if only by a tiny bit, closer to that described in the Bible: dignified, respectful, just and at peace.

14 September 2026