From: Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (1145th day)
On this beautiful spring morning, when families were walking to church or heading to the park to play with their children, terror struck.
A ruzzian ballistic missile hit the heart of city’s downtown. At least 32 people lost their lives — among them, two children. A trolleybus was caught in the blast. Almost everyone inside was killed instantly.
There was a children’s theater performance scheduled nearby for 11 a.m. — if the missile had struck just minutes later, we would be mourning dozens more children today.
This is the reality we live with. This is what “peace” looks like when negotiated by people sitting oceans away. This morning, as the blood of our people still soaked the streets, I read that Trump said “peace negotiations are going well.”
Maybe his idea of “peace” is different from ours. Maybe what’s going well is Trump blackmailing Ukraine into signing some “mineral deal,” while putin helps by escalating attacks on civilians to break our spirit.
Peace does not come from surrendering to terrorists. Peace does not come from selling out our future. Peace does not come by signing away the lives of our people for profit. Real peace comes through justice.
Voice of Ukraine 
3 responses to “4/13/2025 — A Horrible Morning in Sumy”
Heavenly Father, You are the author of peace AND justice! Please bring justice and peace to Ukraine! Daily I plead for these two things!
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Exodus 2:23-25
We may wonder Does God see? Are we invisible?
The Israelites may have asked Does God know? The Egyptians are getting away with murder!
These verses remind us God sees. God knows. He knows our sorrows for Jesus became a Man of Sorrows.
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April 30, 1944
J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Christopher
“The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets) and always will be (despite the propagandists)– not of course that it has not is and will be necessary to face it in an evil world. But so short is human memory and so evansescent are its generations that in only about 30 years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches most about fire.
“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…No man can estimate what is really happening at the present ‘sub species aeterniaris’. All that we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast powere 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 termporal 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.”
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