I was in Southend last Sunday helping celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Southend Deaf Centre.

It was a fun and moving occasion.

Afterwards I drove along the seafront.

It was a wild, blustery day.

I parked the car and stood looking out towards Kent.

The wind buffeted me. There was rain in the air, and a storm approaching.

It was the Sunday after the terrorist attacks in Paris.

Now I know this is supposed to be a column about life in Essex, but in my mind, as I looked beyond Kent to that other stretch of water that separates us from France, I thought how close we are to one another, and how small and fragile the world is.

I was also thinking about the service I had just been to.

It was all conducted in sign language. In order to know what was going on I needed an interpreter.

Our world faces similar challenges.

IS poses a dramatically different threat to ones we have faced before.

Neither a straightforward terrorist group with a single cause, nor a nation, they claim to speak for Islam but don't.

We need to understand them enough so as to nullify and destroy the terrible threat they pose to the world.

But also the rest of the world needs to find a common language - and possibly a new one - so as we can act together.

Military intervention, though necessary to thwart the kind of terrorist attacks we witnessed in Paris last week, is not sufficient.

We need a plan, and that plan must encompass the whole of the Middle East and include help for the refugees who are fleeing the same terrors to which Paris has been subjected.

This plan must support every strategy for sharing a new language of life and hope that is strong enough to defeat the vocabulary of death and despair that IS dress up as faith.

It is only from this common language that real and lasting peace can emerge.

We are an island. We always look out to sea.

The temptation is to think these things that trouble the world are someone else's problem.

They are not.

We are one humanity, and we urgently need to find a way of speaking with one voice.

Whatever your faith, please pray for all who suffer in our world as a result of violence and conflict; pray for those who put their own lives on the line in the security and emergency services; and please pray for our leaders that they may be given wisdom and courage.

By Stephen Cottrell