From: Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 739):
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
Psalm 139:7-8
The rescue operation in Odesa is over. The Russian drone that hit an apartment building took the lives of 12 people and left a few in critical condition in the ICU. Among those 12, there are five children:
Timothy, 4 months old
Elizabeth, 8 months old
Mark, 2 years old
Zlata, 8 years old
Serhii, 10 years old
Elizabeth, Zlata, and Serhii are siblings. Their parents were killed with them. The whole family was simply wiped out.
These children were peacefully sleeping in their beds. Were they a threat to Russia? Of course, they were because they were born in an independent democratic country, and there’s no greater threat to Russia. That’s the reason for the ongoing genocide, and if someone thinks Russia would stop at Ukraine, they are deceiving themselves.
I may look fine on the outside, but inside, I go from numbness to grief to anger to despair… I try to keep myself busy, to make myself useful, so that I wouldn’t have the mental capacity to process this wickedness, yet it catches up with me and overwhelms me.
Today, we visited a church in Kyiv, and the sermon was about prayer life at times of death. It’s the question my friends who live outside of Ukraine ask me the most, “How do you handle it?” And my answer is always the same, just as we heard in the sermon today, “Run to God. Lament to Him. Pour out your frustration. Be brutally honest with Him. Let Him heal your pain. Let Him hold you in His embrace as you weep your heart out.”
Thank you, Lord, for being bigger than our pain.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:15-16)
Voice of Ukraine 
4 responses to “3/4/2024 – I may look fine on the outside, but inside, I go from numbness to grief to anger to despair…”
Who shall seperate us from the love of Christ? Shall hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, sword? In all these things we are more than conquerers through Him Who loved us. For I [Paul] am convinced that nothing: life, death, angels, powers, the present, the future, nothing in all creation can seperate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our lord. (Rom.8)
LikeLike
Joseph said to his brothers, “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50)
“Though we may wish for a longer life for our loved ones, they don’t. While we are crying to God, they are singing before God.” –Max Lucado
LikeLike
I Thess.4
If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.
For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
LikeLike
“But his life was so short…
Her days were so few..
Our God is good. Always. We must start with that. And though we may wish for a longer life for our loved ones, they don’t. While we are weeping before God, they are singing before Him.”
–Max Lucado ‘Traveling Light: Psalm 23’
LikeLike