#BeingHuman. These reflections, and I cannot live or work without journaling, were born yesterday evening in the silence that followed Vita’s funeral, our pastor’s beloved wife now laid to rest.
Sitting alone and preparing today’s sermon, with fresh grief pressing against the necessity of Sunday morning ministry, and with my brother Andrii still in that grief, I found myself wrestling with the most fundamental questions of faith. How do we speak of God’s presence when death feels so devastatingly final? How do we prepare words of hope while the soil from a fresh grave still stains our hands? This morning, standing before our Skelya congregation, none of this was theological abstraction, but the raw reality of what it means to be alone with God in our deepest pain.
Every person has a Gethsemane of their own, a private garden of suffering and temptation where we remain alone with God and with our deepest fears, and that holy space of the soul becomes the crucible where faith is either forged or broken. Perhaps we have spent too much time fleeing the very loneliness God intends to use for our transformation. We polish our faith until it gleams and carefully avoid those brutal places where fear and anguish intersect with the divine, though in the middle of a full-scale war those places are not hard to reach. I believe there is no authentic participation in God’s mission without walking through our own gardens of suffering, and that we cannot sidestep Gethsemane on the road to resurrection. The question that confronted me last night, and that confronts each of us, concerns whether we will embrace this holy solitude as the crucible where genuine faith is forged, or flee it and remain forever spiritual children, untested and untransformed.
The silence that speaks. In the most critical moment of His life, Jesus received no direct answer from the Father. “He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, ‘O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will’” (Matthew 26:39, NKJV). And that divine silence becomes the very space where faith moves from knowing about God to encountering Him, in the paradox of presence through absence, when the soul learns to hear God through silence rather than through words. During this war I have learned that God is closest when He seems most distant, and that His love is strongest where my loneliness runs deepest. The closest relationships with God are forged in hours of struggle and uncertainty rather than in moments of spiritual ecstasy during Sunday worship.
The stripping away of pretense. That garden tears away every mask and confronts us with the naked truth about ourselves, in what I would call the existential nakedness of the soul, where we see ourselves without adornment or justification, as we are here and now. Falling face down becomes the place of encounter with the living God, stripped of all spiritualized performance and social expectation. “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34, NKJV). There all pretense falls away, and out of the confrontation with our own authenticity genuine prayer is born, the cry of a heart that acknowledges its weakness and its desperate need for grace. This inner struggle is part of our maturing in faith rather than sin, and the tension between our will and our surrender becomes the birthplace of spiritual depth, where character is formed through honest wrestling with divine purposes.
The loneliness of leadership. Even surrounded by His closest friends, Jesus was utterly alone, and this is a hard truth: there are places in our pain where no one else can follow, however much they love us. Even those closest to us cannot enter the holy of holies of our suffering, and just as surely we cannot enter theirs, however desperately we wish to carry their pain. “Then He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, ‘What! Could you not watch with Me one hour?’” (Matthew 26:40, NKJV). Human support has its boundaries, and even the people we love most may fail us at the moment we need them. The disciples were “sleeping from sorrow” (Luke 22:45, NKJV), which shows the harsh reality of emotional exhaustion in those who try to support us through difficult times. Understanding this helps us extend mercy toward people who cannot always give us the support we hoped for, since their sincere desire to help often runs up against their human limits, and recognizing that frees us from illusions about human support and directs us to the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps.
Love that intercedes in agony. Intercessory suffering reveals the priestly dimension of that garden, since we never suffer for ourselves alone and our suffering reaches into the lives of others in ways we may never fully understand. “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail” (Luke 22:31–32, NKJV). Even in His own crushing agony, Jesus prayed for the disciples and for Peter in particular, and authentic leadership reveals itself in caring for others precisely when we ourselves are going through the worst. In prayer for the friends who fall, the highest form of love shows itself, a love that refuses to abandon a friendship in the falling. Satan actively sifted the disciples, exploiting their weaknesses and fears with calculated precision, and in our own moments of testing we too become prime targets, when the enemy of human souls tries to capitalize on our vulnerability. Yet the promise stands: “when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:32, NKJV). The word when, rather than if, shows absolute confidence in the eventual restoration of His friend despite the fall, and it tells us that our failures belong to the formation of a Christ-like character rather than being final defeats.
The paradox of sacred solitude. Solitude with God transforms us in the end, since our deepest changes happen in silence with Him, whether we like it or not, and in that holy aloneness we discover that God’s silence is a presence too deep for human words rather than an absence. Gethsemane teaches that real maturity is found in deepening our connection with God through the struggle rather than in the absence of struggle. “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39, NKJV). This surrender, born in the depths of anguish, becomes the road from Gethsemane to resurrection, from the garden of our sorrow to the garden of the empty tomb.
So what? That garden is the beginning of the road home rather than the end of the story. After the anguish comes the Via Dolorosa, that sorrowful road we walk carrying our crosses. After the way of tears comes Golgotha, where every hope seems to die, where darkness covers the earth, and where even God appears absent. After the crucifixion comes the tomb, that cold silent space where our dreams are buried and our faith seems futile.
And this apparent defeat, this passage through suffering and death and burial, is the only road to the empty tomb, to resurrection morning, to eternal life, and to that promised land where war is only a memory, where fear has no power, where pain cannot reach, and where every tear is wiped away by the hands of the One who conquered death itself. So the garden of our sorrow becomes the garden of our victory, though only if we are willing to walk the whole path, embracing even the darkness, trusting that Sunday morning always follows Friday’s crucifixion.
Taras D., Ukraine
Skelya Church, Rivne
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