Today the Ukrainian soul carries the weight of 700 days since the full-scale russian invasion broke our lives apart.
These 700 days have been days of fear and loss, and of the displacement of millions of families, and yet among the ruins and the rubble, through the sirens and the explosions and the sting of tears, the flame of our hope goes on burning.
These 700 days have been a crucible testing the core of our faith and our theology, both theology as identity and theology as practice. How do we hold the horrors of a war together with the teaching of love and compassion and forgiveness? How do we keep faith and hope while the shadows of death move along the edge of despair? What we are learning is that the answers arrive less in the deafening silence of unanswered prayer than in the whispers of God’s presence inside the suffering itself.
Through these 700 days we have looked for that presence in the steady courage of our people at the front, who risk their lives to defend our homes and our freedom. We have looked for it in the acts of selfless kindness by volunteers and church ministers that hold communities together, giving shelter to the displaced and food to the hungry. And we have looked for it in the tear-stained eyes of an orphan and a widow holding on to a prayer, a fragile flame still flickering in the dark.
Through these 700 days the Mission has been challenged and has not been changed by any of it, since the horrors have amplified it instead. In the face of suffering nobody could have imagined, hope, and here I mean hope more than love, becomes a radical act, a weapon against the shared darkness this war and its consequences have brought down on us.
These 700 days have been a stark reminder of how fragile a human being is. We have been broken and we have not yet been defeated. We have been tested and our hope has not yet failed. We have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and we have chosen to keep our eyes turned toward the place where we still expect the light to appear.
Through these 700 days we have been looking for the light of God’s love to lead us out of this shared darkness and back toward the shores of peace, and it is that light we beg for, to rebuild our cities, to heal our wounds and to mend the broken pieces of our nation. It is that light we ask to remind us, on the 700th day and on the 7,000th, that our Mission remains what it always was: to hope, to serve, and to be a beacon of hope in a world that badly needs one, even if the rest of the world forgets us.
Peace be with you.
Taras M. Dyatlik, Ukraine
700 days of the ongoing full-scale russian war against Ukraine
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