Voice of Ukraine

From: Jon Eide — MTW Ukraine Country Director

I’m writing this letter on the Kyiv-Lviv train. It’s cold outside, and last night in Kyiv there was an missile attack on the city – probably will be tomorrow as well. I’ve been making these regular trips to wartime Ukraine for three years now. This visit felt different.

Not different in any outward sense. All of the markers of war are still there. The difference was deeper.

It seems something happens to a person between the first air raid siren and the 749th. Not just a dulling of the senses, or a minimizing of the risk – everyone understands the risk and has some “that was a close one” story about when their house shook so hard they thought it was the end. It’s not that – it’s something … heavier.

Maybe it’s like the difference between the first and the third child for parents, the difference between a two year marriage and a twenty year marriage. The people involved in the parenting and the marriage are different people as a result of the experience.

That was my experience this trip. Yes Ukrainians are “accustomed to” war. The electric blackouts, the “support the war” fundraising campaigns, news from the front (sometimes bad – sometimes good), the air raid sirens, the closed airports, the lack of vacations, etc. But none of those things explain the deeper shift that I saw. The change seemed to me to be spiritual. It seems that Ukrainians are closer to death.

When I was setting up meetings on this trip, many of the people I was getting together with would say a version of James 4:15 “if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”. Charming in a way, but also unsettling. “If the Lord wills” sounds different coming from someone in wartime. “If God has us live until Tuesday, we can meet at 11:00 at the cafe near my house” feels unsettling to me partly because, although I hadn’t thought much about it before, I’d prefer to live till Tuesday too.

But maybe it is just that change that James is pointing out in his letter: “you who say, ‘today or tomorrow we will do this’ … yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance.”

There is a distinct lack of arrogance in Ukraine currently.

This war has brought Ukrainians closer to death, and by extension closer to God. The opposite of arrogance is humility and dependence, and that was present in every conversation I had.

Many of the pastors I talk to mentioned this very thing. People are coming to church now more than ever, and are asking real questions of our leaders and ultimately of God, exactly because they are not in control.

Rage, anxiety, and shaking one’s fist can only last so long before a person looks for hope in something bigger and more solid – God- and it seems that corner is now being turned in Ukraine, this is a lesson that I and the Western church can learn from Ukraine now.

Trauma has touched every family in Ukraine, the wounds are deep and will be long lasting. The hope of the gospel is not that every loss or attack will go away, but rather that God will, and already has, redeemed us in Christ, and every tear will be wiped away in the end, death has been conquered.

Pray that God would sustain and grow the church in Ukraine and that this shift that is happening would lead to full churches and the need for many, many new churches in a (by God’s grace soon) post-war Ukraine.

In Christ,

Jon & Tracy