Reposted by Pastor Sergei Nakul (Big City Church, Kyiv): Brother of the New Life Church, Kyiv, Ukraine, Церква “Нове Життя” church, Anton Akchurin who was thought to be missing, dies. Pastor Anatoly Kaluzhny writes, “Thank you all for prayers and support but Anton Akchurin is already in the Lord. It is very difficult to experience the horrors of war especially when it takes away the gold fund of our people. Victory will come, but the price we pay is huge. Lord, give us the strength and faith worthy to go through this trial. My prayer for the parents of Anton, Sergiy and Irina, be their comfort and víradadoû”.
Ірина Акчуріна we cry together with you.
Voice of Ukraine 
4 responses to “7/24/2023 – A brother with the Lord”
Our hearts are with you as you grieve this loss.
LikeLike
J.R.R. Tolkien writes to his son, April 30, 1944
… I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days – quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil – historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives.
… But there is still some hope that things may be better for us, even on the temporal plane, in the mercy of God. And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do. And you were so special a gift to me, in a time of sorrow and mental suffering, and your love, opening at once almost as soon as you were born, foretold to me, as it were in spoken words, that I am consoled ever by the certainty that there is no end to this. Probable under God that we shall meet again, ‘in hale and in unity’, before very long, dearest, and certain that we have some special bond to last beyond this life – subject of course always to the mystery of free will, by which either of us could throw away ‘salvation’. In which case God would arrange matters differently!
LikeLike
I am in tears. So many lives lost.
May God comfort his immediate family, and the Church family.
LikeLike
Dear Pastor Sergei Nakul,
So sorry for your loss!
Praying for Sergiy and Irina for the Lord to give them much peace and strength!
Jill
LikeLike