BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. 1100th day of the Russian full-scale war… 11 years and 11 months since the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine, which started in 2014… “What is that in your hand?” Hearing God when our staffs become snakes… and when God unmakes our worlds…

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Borders… Dear friends, I want to share some reflections that emerged during my journey from Rivne to Warsaw: a twelve-hour “odyssey” across two cars and one significant border on the way to the ICETE 2025 Consultation in Albania…

The first vehicle carried me from the war-torn Ukraine to the Ukrainian-Polish border… the second transported me from the border into peaceful Poland, a “manger” for about one million of Ukrainian refugees… There is something profoundly symbolic about crossing from a nation under day-and-night brutal Russian aggression into one where peace remains the daily reality because it is a part of the more substantial “peace deal”… a geographical threshold that mirrors the spiritual thresholds we all face, too…

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Moses understood such borders intimately… those invisible lines where the familiar transmutes into the threatening… where safety dissolves into danger… As I watched the border guards stamp my passport, I couldn’t help but wonder… Doesn’t every prophet eventually face that moment when their staff, their hand, their water – all they’ve relied upon in their desert – must cross over from certainty into transformation? What happens when we are forced to release our grip on what we thought would always sustain us?

Like Moses, we stand barefoot on holy ground, yet our first instinct is to resist, question, and bargain with this disruptive God. “Who am I to go?” we ask, hoping for divine validation of our smallness as we “not-so-great-country” face Russian army or Russian and international (not just Ukrainian) corruption that seems too powerful to challenge.

“What is Your name?” we inquire, seeking control through definition when the world has become undefinable. “What if they don’t believe me?” we protest, revealing our fear of rejection given our prophetic calling to speak uncomfortable truths to congregations blinded by Christian nationalist “great again” fervor or paralyzed by war’s trauma.

“I cannot speak well,” we confess, naming our perceived inadequacies as we face media distortion or information warfare. And finally, the naked truth emerges: “Please send someone else”… our desperate attempt to escape the burning bush of divine commission, to return to a comfortable life that no longer exists.

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What do we cling to? In the barren expanses of our personal “Midians,” we tightly grasp what little we possess. The shepherd’s staff becomes an extension of our very being, a sacred constitution wrapped in moral certainty of the traditional Christian values, a pulpit of the conservative evangelical churches from which truths seemed self-evident, an inheritance of power assumed divinely bestowed…

Our hands, those weathered instruments of daily survival, work until calloused and cracked, building sanctuaries of cultural assumption, molding children in our image, raising flags alongside crosses in unquestioned harmony…

The water sources we’ve carefully mapped become the waypoints around which our existence orbits, the flowing traditions of democratic transition, the clear springs of predictable borders, and the untroubled wells of sovereign nationhood that we drank from without thought or gratitude…

These are not mere tools or resources but the architecture of our desert identity: the invisible foundations we never imagined could shift beneath our feet until the tremors began… How deeply do we cling to these foundations even as they crumble beneath us…

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Yet, in the strange economy of divine calling, God sometimes demands more than simple surrender… He calls for the radical dismantling of our most fundamental securities: those scaffoldings upon which we’ve constructed meaning itself… With terrifying mercy, He allows catastrophe to shatter what we’ve deemed essential, disrupting not just our comfort but our very ontology. The divine hand reaches into history and permits the unthinkable: totalitarian regimes, unprovoked wars, democratic collapse… not as punishment but as revelation?

These ruptures in the fabric of our assumed reality expose how deeply we’ve confused our “evangelical” constructs with cosmic necessities. In His inscrutable wisdom, what we experience as devastation may be God’s severe compassion, breaking our attachments to false securities so we might encounter Him in naked vulnerability…

The terror lies not in God’s absence during these upheavals but in recognizing His presence within them… working through, not despite, the very calamities that unmake our worlds…

The staff that has guided sheep, that moral compass suddenly spinning wildly, that electoral certainty now yielding chaos, that democratic tradition now weaponized against itself, becomes a writhing serpent, sending us stumbling backward in terror from what was once familiar…

Our capable hands, suddenly rendered leprous, five a.m. sirens shattering dawn’s peace, once-vibrant neighborhoods reduced to hollowed concrete tombs, leaders we trusted now unmasked as power-worshippers, become symbols of death and isolation rather than strength and connection…

The water we’ve learned to treasure as life itself, those assumed rights and freedoms, those unquestioned national religious myths, those territorial boundaries drawn in ink we thought was permanent, transforms into blood: undrinkable, unsettling, unusable… The “black swan” arrives not with gentle wings but with talons extended, and in its shadow, every certainty dissolves into question…

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Manifestations of transformation… What does it mean when a nation discovers its freedoms were mere constructs, its security a temporary illusion… When the constitution one revered becomes a contested text, a weapon in cultural wars rather than a shield for the vulnerable, what remains of the “covenant” between citizen and state…

Does the very land beneath a people become unfamiliar when missiles fall upon it… Can a democracy remain itself when truth becomes merely another “right for power” campaign strategy… What happens to people when their language is illegal in their ancestral territories? How does one navigate a “people” where the collective memory itself has become contested ground…

What existential terror this creates within us… We who had finally learned to navigate our wilderness, organize our political rallies, cast our confident votes, build our national narratives, securing our borders are now confronted with the metamorphosis of everything reliable… The tools of our self-sufficiency become instruments of bewilderment, even dread.

Is this not the ultimate disruption: when our Ukrainian churches and seminaries become actual sanctuaries for the displaced, when election nights become vigils of disbelief, when once-safe apartments crumble under missile strikes, when the very things we’ve come to trust are made strange and threatening before our eyes…

What remains of a nation’s soul when its children must sleep in Kharkiv subway stations… What vestiges of faith endure when Russian or “Western” evangelical pulpits become platforms for power rather than prophecy… When a society celebrating peaceful transitions of power begins to normalize threats of retribution, what invisible line has been crossed… When cities with thousand-year histories become targets for erasure, what happens to our understanding of “Christian Christendom” itself…

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Yet even as our staff becomes a snake, our hand turns leprous, and our water transforms to blood – as constitutions are reinterpreted, as borders are redrawn in blood, as democracies struggle against authoritarianism – something profound is being revealed. The voice from the bush isn’t simply calling us to mission; it’s calling us to witness the unmasking of idols and the revelation of true allegiances.

“What is that in your hand?” God asks… The question seems straightforward… until our answer – “A staff” – is dramatically contradicted by a writhing serpent at our feet, and we must finally confront what we have truly been holding all along…

Have we been defending the “traditional Christian values” or merely their comfortable cultural expressions… When a leader or empire becomes more sacred than the teachings of the Stranger, what god is truly being worshipped… When ancient lands are claimed through the language of divine right while their inhabitants are “subject to legitimate ethnocide” and deemed dispensable, what “evangelical” theology is truly at work…

Do we recognize, perhaps for the first time, that what we thought belonged to us – staff, health, water – was always on loan from the Stranger who can transform them at will? Do we acknowledge that our cherished institutions, bodily safety, and flowing resources of prosperity and certainty exist not by our merit or ingenuity but by divine grace? Do we, despite our five questions and our resistance to the Stranger, and despite our shock at election results or our horror at unprovoked invasions, recognize the hand of God still active, still speaking through the fire that does not consume… us…

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What happens when “the right of power” discovers its democratic traditions are more fragile than imagined… How does a sovereign nation respond when its very right to exist is questioned by its “unnamed” neighbor… When a people who traced their exceptionalism to divine blessing discover their institutions can be weaponized against themselves, what theological reckoning awaits… When language about “denazification” becomes the pretext for subjugation and ethnocide, how does the historical memory of the “Christian Christendom” itself become a battlefield…

The Community of Hope stands at this crossroads, tempted to bow before those who present themselves as saviors, whether wrapped in highly spiritual language, bearing beautiful prayers at the faith offices, or promising security in exchange for silence… We find ourselves drawn to strongmen with simple answers, to nationalist theology that baptizes borders with holy water, to leaders who weaponize Scripture while worshipping power…

Yet true salvation has never come through those who demand the title σωτηρ for themselves, who dehumanize the other while claiming divine mandate… Neither charismatic candidates nor patriarchal presidents, neither evangelical endorsements nor Οrthodox blessings can deliver what only the burning bush can reveal…

What becomes of faith when it marries political power for the “right of power”… Can a church retain its prophetic voice when it speaks with the accent of Christian nationalism… When Russian religious leaders bless missiles before they are launched on Ukrainian civilian targets, what sacrilege is being committed in God’s name… When evangelical churches become mere instruments of state power, vessels for “Western” or Russian imperial ambitions rather than vessels of grace, what transubstantiation occurred in their very foundations…

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The ultimate hope lies not in our staff returning to wood, our skin to health, or our water to clarity… though these would bring comfort. We yearn for a return to “normal”… for political stability, peaceful neighborhoods, and the gentle rhythms of life before everything transformed. Yet such yearning misses the revelation within the disruption…

Our salvation resides in recognizing that when God disrupts our “Midians”… our desert patterns, He reveals something profound: He acts, intervenes, and is present, not just in our comfort but in our disruption… The ground beneath our feet, seemingly ordinary until now – whether “across the ocean” where democracy was born or upon war-torn lands where ancient peoples forged their identity – has always been holy.

Our task is not merely to survive the wilderness… but to see it truly for what it is for the Community of Hope: a place of divine encounter where we finally recognize that the voice in the fire matters infinitely more than the hands that hold the staff…

“What do you see?” – the Lord asked every single prophet in various ways. This divine question never came in times of peace and prosperity… but always amid the ashes of temples, the lamentations of widows, the cries of orphaned children, and the collective trauma of a people crushed between imperial powers or by the “right of power”…

The question echoes across millennia, from a burning bush to nations burning with aggression, wars, and divisions…. Perhaps our answer, after all our questioning and resistance to the Stranger, might finally be: “I see You, God – not just in tranquility, but in transformation… not just in my comfort, but in my terror… not just in my certainty, but in my bewilderment”…

For it is there, in the smoldering ruins of what we once called “normal”, in the wreckage of our national and spiritual identity, in the silent aftermath of damage and destruction when even prayers seem inadequate… when our staffs have become snakes and our hands have turned leprous… that we finally stand barefoot on holy ground to hear… “I am with you”….

Peace be with you and keep your children away from war…
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Taras Dyatlik, Warsaw (Poland)
27 February 2025