When the Wave Comes

We have our backs to the water. And a tsunami is coming.

That was essentially what ABC's Sarah Ferguson said recently on the Politics Now podcast: the Federal Government can see what's about to hit, and the electorate is a bit too relaxed about it. Most of us know the global situation is volatile. But most of us are looking the other way, assuming everything will be fine.

The Bible has a name for that assumption. It calls it foolishness.

Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. (Proverbs 27:1)

The Hebrew word for "boast" here carries connotations of self-glorying, of making yourself large. The warning isn't simply against overconfident planning. It's against the hubris that treats tomorrow as already secured. Qohelet in Ecclesiastes 8:7 goes further: human ignorance of the future isn't an accident or a limitation to be overcome. It's deliberate. To be a creature is to stand within time without commanding it.

James lands the point, riffing off Ecclesiastes: "What is your life?" Answer: “mist.” Here, then gone. (James 4:14)

But he doesn't leave us there:

"Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.'" (James 4:15)

Our finitude isn't a deficiency but the very shape of faithful, dependent existence before the One who alone holds tomorrow. Which means the person who says if the Lord wills isn't just being pious. They are being accurate. They have stopped pretending to be larger than they are.

That is where wisdom begins.

The Man Who Thought He Had Time

Jesus tells a story about a farmer who does everything right and gets it badly wrong.

He's had a bumper harvest. He plans ahead, builds bigger barns, secures his future. Then he talks to himself:

"You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." (Luke 12:19)

It sounds reasonable. It sounds like a man who has worked hard and earned the right to stop worrying. But God's response is blunt:

"You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you." (Luke 12:20)

The Greek word translated "life" is psychē, soul, self, the animating centre of a person. He had staked his very self on what the barn could hold. God's verdict isn't anger. It's something closer to grief. This is what foolishness looks like when it has dressed itself up as wisdom.

That night, everything changed.

Notice what the farmer isn't condemned for. Not for working hard. Not for planning. Not even for building bigger barns. He is condemned for locating his psychē, his deepest security, his truest self, in something that could not bear the weight. The problem was never the barn. It was what he had put inside himself.

The Storm Comes to Both Houses

The Sermon on the Mount offers a companion picture. A storm, Jesus says plainly, comes to both houses: the one built by the wise builder and the one built by the foolish builder. Same rain. Same rising flood. Same battering wind. (Matthew 7:24-27)

The difference is never about avoidance. It's about the foundation.

Both the rich fool and the foolish builder share the same error: they have heard the right things and done nothing about them. The farmer knew his life was in God's hands. Every Israelite did. The foolish builder had heard Jesus' words. Neither of them acted on what they knew. Hearing without doing is another name for self-deception. And self-deception, Jesus suggests, is a surprisingly common way to build a life.

The wise builder isn't the person who has everything figured out. They are the one who has stopped pretending everything will always be fine.

Building on rock is Jesus' metaphor for repeated acts of trust, surrender and obedience, long before the storm arrives. Which means the stability it produces isn't a last-minute defence scrambled together in a crisis. It's a long-formed strength that was already there when the rain came down. The rock isn't something you find in an emergency. It's something you've been standing on for years.

Where Does Your Security Actually Lie?

Here is what both stories are really asking: where have you located your psychē?

It's a question worth sitting with before the wave arrives, not after. Because the honest answer shapes everything: how you respond to financial pressure, how you treat people when resources tighten, whether anxiety makes you smaller or whether your foundation holds.

Building your life on Christ removes the need for certainty and control as the basis of your peace because your security is no longer hostage to the things most likely to fail you. The economy contracts. Health falters. The market does what markets do. When your life is built on Christ, these things can shake you, and your foundation holds, because you were resting on something circumstance cannot touch.

That is a very different thing from stoicism. Stoicism says: don't feel it. The gospel says: feel it, and stand anyway. Your house is built on what the storm cannot take.

The Ancient Invitation

The church has historically been at its best in a crisis. We are a community that can absorb loss without being undone by it, because we are organised around something greater than self-preservation.

That has looked like specific things across history. It looked like Christians staying in plague-hit cities when others fled, caring for the sick and burying the dead. It looked like sharing food during famines, taking in refugees, and standing with those who had nothing left, all done because their security was located somewhere risk couldn't reach.

Right now, in a context of rising economic anxiety, that same call comes to us. When the instinct is to pull inward and protect what we have, choosing deeper dependence on God and wider generosity toward others is not naïveté. It is witness: the lived argument that human life can be ordered around something other than scarcity and fear.

It might mean giving more rather than less when the pressure to hoard increases. It might mean being the person in your community who is genuinely calm, not because you're uninformed, but because your peace has a different source. It might mean your household becomes a place of unusual hospitality as others close their doors.

We should pray that the tsunami doesn't come. But if it does, we can't control the water. We can only be wise about where we are standing.

The invitation is ancient and newly urgent: build your house on the rock. Stand firm. And when the time comes, reach out a hand to those who are falling.