BEING HUMAN

Day 5, 5 December 2024, the 1016th day of the full-scale war.

In the dead of the night when the invasion began on 24 February 2022, our broken night, Ukrainian families packed what little they could carry and moved through the darkness like shadows, millions of them looking for safety wherever it could be found. By November 2024 that exodus had scattered 7.7 million Ukrainians across the world, close to a quarter of our population: 5.3 million found refuge in European Union countries, 880,000 in the United States, 408,000 in Canada, 200,000 in the United Kingdom. Inside Ukraine another 3.7 million people were displaced from their homes and are sheltering in safer regions.

These are not statistics but stories of families torn apart. Members of our own team joined millions of others in this modern exodus, our children and our siblings sleeping in unfamiliar beds, their lives uprooted overnight. Some crossed the western border, others looked for shelter inside the country. Every number is somebody leaving behind a home that may never be home again. What does it mean to preserve a life by losing the ground that nourished it? How do we carry an identity when we are forced to abandon everything that anchored it?

“Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ‘Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him’” (Matthew 2:13, NKJV).

The midnight flight of the Holy Family into Egypt echoes across the centuries into our own exodus. They too knew the weight of hasty packing, the uncertainty of a refugee road, the bitter taste of forced displacement. Jesus, the divine Word made flesh, became a refugee from a ruler’s genocidal ambition, since Herod’s decree sought to extinguish a future and erase a promise that threatened his claim to absolute power, rather than merely to kill a child. Just as Herod feared a rival kingdom, an empire today seeks to erase Ukrainian nationhood, treating our existence as a threat to its own ambitions.

That God Himself fled as a refugee reshapes how we understand forced migration. It becomes a space of divine solidarity, where God knows this journey intimately, rather than only a human crisis. And just as the angel guided Joseph through a dream, many Ukrainians speak now of divine guidance in their own decisions: when to leave, where to look for refuge, how to protect a family from a war. The Egyptian exile reveals God’s solidarity with everyone who flees violence and carries children through danger toward sanctuary, and so our displacement becomes a place where divine presence meets human suffering, and heaven’s guidance meets the anguish of the earth.

Today the scattered children of Ukraine sleep in unfamiliar beds, in homes in the west of the country, across Europe, around the world. Like the Holy Family in Egypt, they struggle to hold on to an identity in a foreign land while waiting for another message that it is safe to return, that the war is over. Each family’s flight traces an ancient path of survival, and each temporary shelter becomes a holy space of preservation. This exile, as the Holy Family discovered, is about carrying God’s future through a present darkness rather than about geography alone. Every Ukrainian family fleeing violence takes part in that pattern, carrying something precious through the broken night, our identity and our future and our hope of return, trusting in divine protection and in the promise of homecoming. And just as the Holy Family returned once Herod’s threat had passed, we hold to the promise that they too will return, when the shadow of empire lifts from our land.

Prince of Peace, who guided the family of Your Son through danger into safety, watch over Your scattered children today. For those sleeping in strange lands, be their familiar comfort. For those sheltering far from home, be their strong tower. Turn their exile into testimony and their displacement into witness. Guide them, and guide us, as You guided Joseph, with dreams that tell us when to flee and when to return. Until then, help us build sanctuaries of hope wherever we find ourselves, in Ukraine or abroad. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of the exodus. Amen.