BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. Between light and shadow… Existential reflections on witnessing, written after the presentation of the book “Light in the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Stories of Christians”…

We continue our journey, bearing witness to what our eyes have seen and our hearts have endured. Some say we wander homeless in a world that has chosen to look away, where international religious and political powers speak of global security crises and complex situations, diplomatic language that obscures a simple truth: Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. Yet we know that while Cain may strike his brother down today, tomorrow holds the promise of resurrection, and this is our confession of faith among the ruins.

When everything lies broken after each new night of cherry-red skies, we still find a way to speak of God. For where else would God be, if not among the broken-hearted, among those who have lost everything and somehow find themselves again amid thousands of lost faces? To those outside Ukraine the way we speak about God may sound harsh and raw, even biblically disturbing, stripped of comfortable theological abstraction and polished Sunday rhetoric. And this broken language of faith is exactly what proves our longing for Him, for His hand and His protection and His presence inside our suffering. We no longer want the filtered experience of a loud Sunday morning in a mega-church, since what we crave now is an intimate relationship and an authentic presence, a God who remains when everything else has been taken away and whispers, “I love you, Taras.”

The authors of this book stand as witnesses at the cross, and on that cross hang those who have given or are still giving their lives for ours and for our freedom, those crucified in the name of the Russian World and of supposedly traditional Christian values, dehumanized values that somehow justify the attempted erasure of an entire people. Many evangelical Christians in russia consciously ignore what is happening here, either because television does not show them the truth, or because they do not want to know it, or because they claim we shell ourselves for the sake of anti-russian propaganda. Not everyone, and still so many.

When Christ hung on the cross, not everyone gathered nearby. Many were in the taverns of Jerusalem, going about their business, and the disciples themselves, all of them witnesses to His suffering, had left Him alone in Gethsemane, so that only John somehow reached the cross together with Mary and the other women while the rest watched from a distance. Yet Peter and the disciples later testified about Christ as witnesses to what had actually happened, though many did not believe them and even persecuted them for it.

Today we, the twelve authors and so many others in Ukraine, testify in the same way about what is happening here, whatever russian evangelicals say, and whatever is said in the West by those under the influence of russian propaganda, the ones who claim that Bucha was staged with British actors. We witness what is being done to our people, our Church, our families and ourselves. This is our Ukrainian Golgotha, and many may dislike the term, though Golgotha is precisely when you are destroyed for who you are rather than for anything you did or failed to do.

We often long to hear stories of resilience and steadfastness, of forgiveness and healing, and we rarely want to see the price at which steadfastness comes, or to acknowledge that not everyone remains unbroken.

We find ourselves caught between a yellow box of humanitarian aid and the cold reality of war. We are the spouses, the parents, the brothers and sisters, the children who wait and who believe despite everything while carrying the weight of loss. We are those who must find themselves again after every familiar landmark has been destroyed, and those who followed a call into places we never imagined going, places well outside what we were told in 2022 and 2023 was our primary calling.

The authors of this book form a chorus of witnesses, a polyphony of different voices, and that chorus carries the cry and the pain of witnesses along with their faith and their hope. Even when, after this war, many will say that they did not know, did not think, believed it was untrue, never heard of the Russian World or of russia’s war against Ukraine but only of some special military operation and a conflict in Ukraine, we will keep testifying. Our wounds will testify. Our fallen spouses and parents and children will testify, even if many refuse to believe it. We bear witness before God as well as before people, and His will be the final word.

This testimony carries theological weight because it happens at the border, in the liminal space where faith is tested most severely, and because these are raw encounters with the divine in the valley of the shadow of death rather than theoretical reflections composed in a comfortable seminary office. The authors bear witness to relationships transformed by this war: to the relationship with oneself, as identity is shattered and remade; with others, as love is tested against unimaginable loss among the displaced, the fallen, the missing and the captive; and with the Other, as faith confronts the silence that so often accompanies suffering.

Like those who stood at Golgotha, we were placed in a position of witnessing that we did not choose. And in that involuntary witnessing we find ourselves inside a theological tradition as old as the faith itself, the tradition of testimony that refuses to let suffering have the last word, that insists on speaking truth even when the powers of this world would prefer silence, and that proclaims resurrection while still standing in the shadow of the cross.

In the end we may be betrayed by those we thought would stand with us, politically and internationally. The world and its great-again Christian empires may turn away, distracted by other crises. But we will go on, and not because we believe our testimony will change the course of international or religious politics, but because witnessing is itself an act of resistance against the darkness that would otherwise consume us. To speak truth in a world of lies is to keep a light burning, however small, and in that light we find our home again, and our identity, and our God, no longer homeless but making His dwelling precisely where humanity suffers most.

This is our raw theology, written in blood and tears and in a stubborn hope that refuses to die, and that confesses the resurrection inside the valley of the shadow of death.

Taras D., Ukraine
19 March 2025, Wednesday