Photo by Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters
From Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 575):
Do good, O Lord, to those who are good, and to those who are upright in their hearts!
Psalm 125:4
My husband woke me up with the words, “Go to the hallway, now!” He carried our son there as well. There were blasts of air defense coming from the outside. I checked the time — it was almost 6 a.m. Funny, but my first thoughts were, “At least their timing is good, and I won’t sleep through my alarm!”
This morning, all of Ukraine was under the air raid warning. 52 missiles were coming from different directions, and our air defense shot down 38 of them (20 were aimed at Kyiv). It was a massive attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure for the first time in six months. It resulted in partial power outages in the Rivne, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv regions.
In Cherkasy, a hotel building was destroyed, and 11 people were injured. There were hits in the Khmelnytskyi, Lviv, and Rivne regions.
Ironically, in the Kyiv region, the debris of the shot-down missile fell on the PepsiCo warehouses. The company hasn’t left the Russian market and even has increased its share there, paying taxes to the Russian government, which are turned into military weapons later. Now, their “business as usual” has caught up with them because war is not a “respecter of persons.”
Once all the sirens were cleared, we went to school, and it looked like an ordinary day. During lunch, one of my students excitedly told me he heard a missile going over his house while sheltering in the bathroom (bathrooms and apartment hallways are considered the safest places in case you can’t get to a bomb shelter).
In the evening, we were talking with my husband and sharing how unusually normal these abnormal days felt. I was horrified that we so easily get used to these circumstances. In response, Ivan Іван Капітонов noted that this war, while despicable and horrible, simply revealed a sad reality of this world, in which thousands of people die every day, both physically and spiritually. The grand battle is in full swing, so we must be strong and put on the armor of God to withstand whatever may be coming our way. Thankfully, we already know how this battle ends, so let us gain strength and courage from this knowledge.
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)
Voice of Ukraine 
4 responses to “9/22/2023 – My husband woke me up with the words, “Go to the hallway, now!””
Thank you so much for your update. I didn’t get on email from Voice of Ukraine yesterday. I was concerned about what happened. My prayers are with all of you. For me hearing the concerns guides my prayers. Some days I think I am back again Father with crying for safety and an end to the aggression. Yes, wherever we are we need to recognize we are in a fight against evil whether it is visible or not.
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lyrics by Rich Myllins:
Sometimes my life just don’t make sense at all,
When the mountains look so big, and my faith just seems so small–
So hold me, Jesus, because I’m shaking like a leaf.
You have been King of my glory.
Won’t You be my Prince of peace?
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C.S.Lewis, veteran of WWI and II, agrees:
“War threatens us with death and pain. No man — and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane — need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that – of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier; but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chance of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstance would?
Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.”
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