I woke the other morning with a phrase running through my mind:
“The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
It’s not original, of course. It surfaced in popular culture decades ago—most memorably in a 1980s song by the band Fun Boy Three—but like all enduring phrases, it has a way of returning at just the right moment.
And this past week, it didn’t feel like a joke. It has been one of those weeks when many people—perhaps most of us—have felt unsettled in a way that is hard to put into words.
A sense of shock. Of outrage. Of disbelief.
Not necessarily because something has happened—but because of what has been spoken, and the scale of what has been contemplated. The kind of language that gestures toward devastation on a scale almost beyond imagining.
Even when the moment passes, it does not entirely pass. Something remains—in the body, in the imagination, even in the quiet moments: a residue of unease, a question about the kind of world we are living in, and who—or what—is shaping its direction.
When the World Tilts
There are times when the world seems to tilt—when words are spoken in the public sphere that carry a weight out of all proportion to the people who utter them. Words that unsettle, that threaten, that hint at consequences far beyond what any of us can control. For a few days, it can feel as though everything we have taken for granted—the fragile web of international stability, the assumption that someone, somewhere, is in charge—might unravel.
Even when the moment passes, something lingers.
A question hangs in the air: Who, exactly, is steering this?
And perhaps more uncomfortably: Have we placed our trust in things that were never as stable as we imagined?
The Instinct to Do Something
And for many people of faith, another instinct rises almost immediately:
Surely we must be able to DO something.
If God is real—if God is good—if God hears us—then surely prayer must count for something at a moment like this. Surely, if enough of us cry out, something might change. Something must change.
It is a deeply human response. Not naïve, but instinctive. When faced with the possibility of great harm, we reach for whatever agency we believe we have—however small—and we use it.
But alongside that instinct comes a quieter, more troubling question:
What kind of God are we imagining when we pray like this?
There is a temptation, at moments like this, to look for reassurance—to assume that beneath the noise and volatility, there is a steady hand guiding events toward a safe conclusion. But the truth is more sobering.
Jesus never promised us an easy or predictable world.
“In this world you will have trouble,” he said. Not might. Not occasionally. Will.
We have, perhaps, quietly assumed otherwise. We have built our lives—and our expectations—on the belief that stability is normal, that progress is inevitable, that the structures of power we see around us will somehow hold.
But what if they don’t?
What if what we are witnessing is not an aberration, but an unveiling?
What Are We Trusting?
It is easy to say, “the lunatics are running the asylum,” and leave it there—as though the problem were simply a matter of the wrong people being in charge. But that may be too simple.
The deeper question is this: what have we trusted that is now being exposed as fragile?
Power without restraint.
Certainty without humility.
Leadership untethered from truth.
These things have always been with us. But in times of relative calm, we can afford to ignore them. When the ground begins to shake, they become impossible to miss.
The Seduction of Certainty
And there is another danger here—one that is less obvious, but just as real.
When the world feels unstable, we are drawn toward certainty. Toward clarity. Toward strong, simple narratives that divide the world neatly into good and evil, heroes and villains.
As the British comedian and writer John Cleese once observed, extremism is appealing not because it is true, but because it is satisfying. It gives us enemies to blame and a sense of righteousness to sustain us. It simplifies a complex world into something we can grasp and control.
But in doing so, it diminishes us.
Because real life is rarely simple. And real solutions are rarely found in the places where outrage feels most comfortable.
Humour and the Exposure of Power
There is, perhaps, a place here for a little humour—not to dismiss what is happening, but to expose its absurdity.
Jesus himself was not above this. He spoke of “that fox Herod,” reducing a powerful ruler to a wily, opportunistic creature. And yet, as the image suggests, a fox in the henhouse is no trivial matter—it brings mayhem and real devastation. He described religious leaders who would travel across land and sea to make a single convert, only to make them “twice as much a child of hell” as themselves. It is not polite humour. It is sharp, revealing, and strangely liberating.
Because humour, at its best, reminds us that power is never quite as absolute as it appears. It punctures the illusion. It allows us to step back, to breathe, and to see more clearly.
What Are We to Do?
But still the question remains: What are we to do?
Before we rush to answer that, it may be that we need first to find a place from which to respond.
In such moments, the instinct is to reach for reassurance—to hope that somewhere, behind the turbulence, there is a firm hand guiding events toward a safe conclusion.
But Jesus never offered that kind of comfort. He did not promise a predictable world, or leaders we could rely on to keep everything in order. Instead, he spoke of something quieter, and far more demanding: a place to stand.
“Go into your room and shut the door,” he says—not as an escape from reality, but as a way of returning to it more truthfully. A place where we are no longer driven by the noise, the outrage, or the shifting winds of public life, but are steadied in something deeper. A place where we learn to see clearly again.
But for many of us, that inner room is not an easy place to be; it is not always an oasis. We do not enter it and immediately find peace. More often, we bring our anxieties with us—and in the silence, they can feel louder than ever. The mind races, the heart churns, and the very space that is meant to steady us can feel overwhelming.
If that is our experience, we are not failing at prayer. We are simply discovering how much noise we carry.
And perhaps this is where we need to be gentle with ourselves. The “place to stand” is not always found in stillness alone. For some, it emerges gradually—through music, through reading, through conversation, through the quiet shaping of words. For some, it comes while walking, or working, or writing. Even the act of trying to make sense of the world before God can become a form of contemplation.
What matters is not the method, but the meeting. There is an old Christian insight—perhaps most simply expressed by Watchman Nee in his little book Sit, Walk, Stand—that the life of faith begins not with striving, but with learning to “sit”: to receive, to rest, to be grounded in what is already given. Only then do we learn how to walk—and, when needed, to stand.
Because unless something in that space—however faintly—anchors us, quietens us, or draws us into a deeper reality, we will not remain there. Nor should we force ourselves to.
This is not withdrawal. It is a different kind of presence.
Without such a grounding, we are easily swept along by the currents of the moment—reacting, amplifying, and often becoming part of the very instability we lament. But when we are rooted—when our lives are quietly anchored in God as revealed in Jesus—we begin to find a different way of being in the world.
Not detached, but not driven.
Not indifferent, but not overwhelmed.
And from that place, even small acts begin to carry a different weight.
A quiet word.
A refusal to join the outrage.
A steadying presence in the life of another.
In a world that sometimes feels as though it is being shaped by noise and instability, these may seem like small things. But they are not nothing.
They are how a different kind of order begins.
It is here that despair can quietly take hold. We look at the scale of global forces, the volatility of leadership, the complexity of the systems we inhabit—and we feel small, even irrelevant.
The Quiet Work of Change
What difference can ordinary people make in a world like this?
More than we imagine.
And it is worth remembering this.
For all the noise of global leadership—for all the volatility, the posturing, the rhetoric—most of the world is not governed by spectacle, but by faithfulness.
Ordinary people, in countless unseen ways, continue to hold things together. They care for their families. They show up to work. They serve their communities. They keep systems running, relationships intact, and daily life moving forward.
It is easy, in moments like this, to imagine that everything is on the brink of collapse. But unless a nation is actually at war, much of what sustains life continues—quietly, reliably—because people choose, day by day, not to give in to cynicism.
Queen Elizabeth II often spoke of this in her Christmas messages—of the quiet, faithful service she had witnessed over the years as she travelled the country. She met people whose work would never make headlines, yet without whom society simply could not function. One suspects that King Charles III sees much the same today.
And that, too, is a form of resistance.
Margaret Wheatley, an American writer on leadership and social change, points to the quiet beginnings of transformation: small groups of people, meeting together, speaking honestly, refusing to give up on one another. In Poland, such gatherings helped give rise to the Solidarity movement, which in time contributed to the collapse of an entire political system—through persistence, relationship, and shared hope.
How the Kingdom Grows
There is something deeply resonant here with the early Church.
They did not begin with power.
They did not control the systems around them.
They did not even expect stability.
What they had was something far more subversive: a way of life rooted in love, forgiveness, and trust in a God who works not by coercion, but from within.
Perhaps this is the most important thing to remember.
God does not intervene in history like a distant ruler pulling levers from above. The God revealed in Jesus does something far more mysterious—and far more demanding.
It is easy to imagine a God who stands above events, directing outcomes, securing victories, and shaping the course of history in response to our prayers. Many sincere believers (myself included, at times) have held such a view, trusting that God will act decisively to bring about good and restrain what is harmful.
But that same image of God can also be taken up in a very different spirit—invoked to justify power, to sanctify particular agendas, or to align divine purpose with national or political ambition. This is the kind of God often appealed to in movements that seek to fuse faith with power.
The God we meet in Jesus refuses to be enlisted in such ways.
He works in human hearts.
In relationships.
In small, faithful communities.
The Kingdom of God does not arrive fully formed. It grows—like a seed, buried in the ground, often unnoticed, often in conditions that seem anything but favourable.
And perhaps this is where we find our hope.
We find it in something quieter and more enduring: the steady, persistent reality that love, lived out in ordinary ways, is not powerless.
It never has been.
There is no entitlement to an easy life in this world.
But there is an invitation.
An invitation to live differently.
To refuse the pull of fear and outrage.
To resist the seduction of certainty that turns others into enemies.
To become, in small and often unnoticed ways, people through whom a different kind of future begins to take shape.
What Does Sanity Look Like?
If the world sometimes feels like an asylum run by the very people it was meant to contain, then the question is not simply who is in charge.
It is this: What does sanity look like?
And the Christian answer, however strange it may seem, is this:
It looks like Jesus—the one who blesses the poor, loves his enemies, and refuses the way of violence.
Jeremy Marks, 13th April 2026