From: Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 1201)
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Psalm 1:5-6
I start my ninth round through the book of Psalms. I remember how odd this book felt to me before the full-scale war, and how in the first days of the 2022 invasion, these poetic verses became the source of my prayers. All of a sudden, they felt relevant. I knew I needed to pour out my heart before the Lord, but I was at a loss for words. My mind was blank as my heart was breaking in pain, and the Holy Spirit started bringing up verses that were stored in the depths of my memory. That’s how Psalms became part of my daily life, and I keep discovering the treasures of this book.
As I’m writing this, we are expecting yet another night of terror with missiles and drones targeting power lines and civil infrastructure (apartment buildings and private houses can also be a nice “bonus” to their planned program). They will keep telling you that it’s their “retaliation” for the strikes on their airfields, but it’s what they’ve been doing in the past without any excuse. They’ll be telling you that Ukraine provoked them, but in fact, Ukraine prevented an even larger attack by taking out (even if temporarily) 30% of their jets. The bully gets bolder once reassured that all their wickedness will be treated as “youthful indiscretion.” We’ve seen russia getting more aggressive in the past several months, mocking the timidity of those who used to be world leaders. Failure to prevent a crime makes you an accomplice, no matter how thoroughly you wash your hands, following Pilate’s example.
We already set up our “hallway bedroom” for the night. Please pray for God’s divine protection and His intervention. May whatever they launch never reach its intended targets. May their bombers malfunction. May they be taken out by friendly fire. May God blind their eyes. May He show up and change the hearts of those launching death at Ukraine just as He changed Saul’s heart on the road to Damascus.
I chose two pictures as today’s illustration. One is a “dark cloud” installation that will be presented at the Burning Man festival as a warning that the disaster is right around the corner for all of us, so we better get ready. The second picture is the rainbow we saw today getting out of the metro, missing a heavy rain by a minute or two. It’s a reminder of God’s grace and long-suffering. Rainbows are impossible without the dark clouds, so let us be faithful and patient to endure the clouds and see the rainbows.
P.S. The sirens went off just as I was ready to hit the “publish” button. Drones are approaching Kyiv. Lord, have mercy!
Voice of Ukraine 
3 responses to “6/9/2025 — Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous…”
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He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53
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C.S.Lewis, veteran of WWI and WWII
“On Learning in Wartime”
“What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased” (61). Instead, he suggests that war makes death impossible to ignore; it confronts us with our mortality.
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