From: Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 704):
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works,
who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke!
Psalm 104:31-32
It’s interesting how, often in our conversations, we slip into memories of the first weeks of the invasion. We retell these stories to each other for the hundredth time, yet we will return to them the next time we see each other.
There are also plans we still make for the time “when the war is over.” There are so many places we want to show our son, and he keeps asking if we’ll ever go there.
Our memories help us keep hoping. Today, we stopped at a Crimean Tatar stand to get some of their traditional food. It immediately brought back the good old memories of the places we visited in Crimea and worrisome wondering about people we knew who still live there. We were telling our son stories of our visits there, and it felt like we were telling him about another planet just because it feels so distant and unreachable now.
Well, at least we have the memories. But our children don’t. Many of them were too young to remember life before the full-scale war (let alone the initial invasion of 2014).
We hold on to our memories and God’s faithfulness, and that’s where our hope is found.
Voice of Ukraine 
2 responses to “1/29/2024 – We hold on to our memories and God’s faithfulness, and that’s where our hope is found.”
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing
He chastens and quickens, His will to make known.
The evil oppressing now cease from distressing-
Sing praises to His name! He forgets not His own!
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From: Sergei Nakul (pastor of Big City Church in Kyiv and military chaplain): Today was the usual service, with the usual songs, with the usual sermon, with the usual reading of St. John. Letters, with ordinary prayers, with ordinary donations, with ordinary church members, with ordinary pastor. But in all this seemingly ordinaryness shone the unusual, incredible, inspiring, grand, breathtaking unusualness of our extraordinary God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Spirit! He chose our ordinary to fill it with his unusual! And this is the unusual beauty of the ordinary worship!
God can do extraordinary things. And He makes them. From time to time. When He sees fit. But, at the same time, He acts in ordinary things to which we may get accustomed to and which may not impress us, though in their ordinary power. This is what our fathers in the faith called ordinary means of grace (ordinary means of grace) – the Holy Scriptures, mysteries, prayer. Faithful use, on a regular basis, of these ordinary means of grace, in the context of Christian koinonia, in our ordinary everyday lives, is more than sufficient. We can admire unusual things and expect them. The main thing is that we do not forget to admire the ordinary means of grace, and to appreciate them.
Jan.7, 2024
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