BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #PeopleOfTheBridge. Two hundred and forty days. September and October 2022… Eight months in, autumn came, and it brought a strange kind of harvest… The relief figures fell again this month, some of them steeply. The number of people in transit dropped from more than ten thousand to barely three hundred, and the food we carried out was nearly halved. But the figure that stopped us this time was moving the other way. In the same eight weeks, the students on our campuses more than tripled, from 837 to over three thousand. Three thousand people, in the middle of a war, sat down to study theology…

The season is part of the point. Under the Old Covenant, when the first grain ripened, Israel was forbidden to eat from the harvest until a sheaf of its earliest stalks had been carried to the priest and lifted up before God: the firstfruits. It was a small offering, a single handful weighed against a whole field. And yet the logic of it was vast: that first portion stood as a pledge on everything still in the ground. To lift the firstfruits was to say aloud that the harvest had truly begun, and that the God who gave the first would give the rest…

These three thousand students are firstfruits since the beginning of the full-scale Russian war. So are the towns that began that same autumn to be freed, the first ground recovered after long months of only losing it. Neither one is the harvest. No one here mistakes a full lecture hall, or a single liberated village, for the end of the war. But firstfruits are not nothing: they are the exact opposite of nothing… They are evidence you can hold in your hand that something has genuinely started to grow, and a claim that the One who began it intends to finish. A nation that fills its seminaries while the shelling goes on is making that claim with its feet…

Here is what these two months held, with the running totals since the war began:

• 354 volunteers carried the work through the autumn
• 296 people were evacuated as fighting continued along the shifting front (total: 10,728)
• 461 displaced people were sheltered and cared for on seminary campuses (total: 4,759)
• 301 people passed through our hubs in transit toward safer ground (total: 55,985)
• 54,405 food boxes and packages reached families driven from their homes (total: 408,231)
• 424 tons of food and humanitarian supplies were delivered where the need was sharpest (total: 3,607)
• 150,000 Bibles and New Testaments were placed into the hands of the displaced, the military, and those living in war zones since the beginning of the full-scale Russian war (total: 508,785)

We are not yet counting the harvest. We are lifting the firstfruits, a handful of ripened grain held up as a promise over a field that is still mostly green, still exposed, and still a long way from being brought in. It is enough to keep working by. It always has been…

If you would help bring in what is coming, you can stand alongside these hubs here:

• Ukraine: Refugees Assistance (through our seminary hubs): https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/48505
• Ukraine: Bibles for refugees and military: https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/65548
• Ukraine: Mental Health and Well-Being Care: https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/45809

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war, Taras D (project manager in Ukraine for the “People of the Bridge”), on behalf of the Coordination Group: Roman Soloviy (Langham, EEIT), Olga Marchak (Mesa Global), Ivan Rusyn (UETS), Oleksandr Geychenko (OTS), Kseniya Trofymchuk (EEIT), Kateryna Shutko (EEIT), Scott Cunningham (Mesa Global), Evan Hunter (Scholar Leaders), Valentin Siniy (TCI)

PS. Thirteen communities carried this eighth month:

1. Chernivtsi Bible Seminary
2. Dialogue in Action (Peacebuilding group)
3. Eastern European Institute of Theology
4. Evangel Theological University (Zaporizhzhia)
5. Kremenchuk Evangelical Seminary
6. Lviv Theological Seminary
7. Odesa Theological Seminary
8. Tavriskii Christian Institute (Kherson)
9. Transcarpathian Christian Institute (Khust)
10. Ukrainian Bible Society
11. Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary
12. University Divitia Gratia (Moldova)
13. Zaporizhzhia Bible Seminary