Written by Stefan van der Berg
France: When Nobody Listens
Hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of France. A town hall in flames. And it all began at a school gate.
In late September 2026, French high school students began blocking the gates of their schools. Their grievances were concrete: crumbling buildings, too few teachers, too many students per class, and classrooms that reach 38 degrees in summer. The government promised 3,000 additional substitute teachers. It was not enough, and the protests only grew. Trade unions joined in, and eventually the Yellow Vests too, who are protesting over the cost of living.
On Saturday 17 October it reached a peak. According to the BBC, more than half a million people took part, largely peacefully. By evening, fires were burning. In a city in central France, the town hall, built in 1883, was gutted, its bell tower and roof collapsing. According to the interior ministry, around 2,400 people were arrested and about 1,000 police officers were injured. The BBC described it as some of the worst unrest in modern French history.
President Macron addressed the nation afterwards. “We all feel anger and shame,” he said. He drew a line between legitimate demands and those who destroyed and looted, and promised full transparency over the conduct of the police. Most protesters were peaceful, according to the interior minister; the fires and looting were the work of several thousand individuals who set out to target public buildings and the police, and later of looters. All of this is happening six months before France’s presidential election in April 2027.
A group of young people in Paris told the BBC they are, in fact, pacifists. They just want change. They asked. They blocked. They protested. And nothing changed.
I cannot justify the looting. But I hear the anger in this movement: young people who feel that nobody is really listening. When demands go too long without enough answers, anger looks for an outlet. For most it was a march. For a few it was fire.
I have also seen what happens when someone does listen, and then acts. In a refugee school in Lebanon there is a girl I will call Lina. She is nine years old and uses a wheelchair. Nobody could get her to school, and at home she slowly began to fade. Then someone found a tuk-tuk driver. Every day he collected her and drove her to school. There, people began to listen to her. She made friends. She began to bloom.
France’s young people say nothing changes. For Lina, something did: a simple tuk-tuk.
It makes me wonder about the young people who sit in our own church pews on Sundays. The question is not whether the youth still listen to the church. The question is whether the church is still a place where a young person can speak without someone immediately producing an answer. A young person who is truly heard does not need a fire to be seen.
Pakistan: The Roof That Fell
While students in France demand better schools, a school in Pakistan literally collapsed on Thursday 15 October. Thirty-four children and a teacher were killed under a single roof in Peshawar. Most of the children were between six and twelve years old. Outside the school and at the hospital, parents stood stunned, waiting. Officials say the roof was simply too heavy for the structure beneath it.
A roof represents our deepest need: safety. It is the promise that everything is going to be all right. Every morning, a parent kisses a child at a gate, turns around, and hands that child over to the illusion that we can control the world. For dozens of parents in Pakistan, that illusion was brutally torn away this week. There are simply no words for the families in Peshawar.
We cannot test every roof in the world. We do not have that control. But for those of us with children under our own roof today, what we do control is the foundation we provide at home. A home where a child’s fears are carried, and where they are listened to without judgment, is the only roof that will truly hold.
South Africa: Bridges Between People
A roof carries weight. So do the bridges between people. And here at home, the numbers suggest those bridges are stronger than we think.
Not long ago I visited a small business in South Africa on behalf of the Industrial Ministry, which has the opportunity to speak to workers about the gospel before their shift or over lunch. There were just a handful of workers on the floor; the owner was not there. At the end of our conversation I asked them: “Is there anything in your own lives I can pray for?” Not once did they think of themselves. Their answer came immediately: “Pray for the owner.”
They see his stress, they said. They know business is scarce, but he refuses to let any of them go. He carries the weight so that they can survive.
Those workers and I do not share the same background. We talk so easily about the “rainbow nation” as a political term in South Africa, but that day I saw it in the flesh. They asked me, a stranger, to help carry their employer’s burden with them.
It reminds me of a recent figure. According to the South African Institute of Race Relations, 89% of South Africans said in March 2026 that our races truly need one another in order to move forward. A year earlier, in March 2025, it was 84%. Polls only show what people say. But that day on the factory floor I saw what people do.
On 4 November 2026, South Africans go to the polls in local government elections. But perhaps a nation is not built in a voting booth. Perhaps a nation is built on a quiet workshop floor, where someone looks at a stranger and says: “Please pray for my boss.”
A young person who is acknowledged, a child under a safe roof, a worker who prays for his boss: that is how a society is built.
Prayer points
- Pray for the young people of France: that they would be truly heard, that frustration would find peaceful and constructive answers, and that the church would be a place where a young person can speak and be listened to.
- Pray for the families in Peshawar who lost their children: for comfort and God’s nearness in unimaginable grief, and for parents everywhere to build a home where a child’s fears are carried.
- Pray for South Africa ahead of the local elections on 4 November: that workplaces would be places where people carry one another’s burdens, and for the Industrial Ministry as it brings the gospel to workers before work and over lunch.