BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #BrutalHonesty. Offered as clarification rather than justification, for our friends and partners outside Ukraine, to help them understand what fatigue means here.

I often hear people say, Taras, you are tired, you need to rest. Yes, I am tired, and yes, sometimes I rest, though I am no longer sure what that word means. But what looks from the outside like simple exhaustion has become our reality, the reality of so many seminary leaders and professors, pastors and volunteers, wives and children, parents and grandparents, widows and orphans. This is our new existence, in which many of us cannot simply disconnect and rest, and we have learned to live inside a condition that resembles exhaustion from outside while functioning as our way of life.

Our fatigue, the fatigue of civilians who are not serving in the Armed Forces and not standing on the front line, however overwhelming it may look, cannot be compared with the exhaustion of my brother Andrii Dyatlik, a military medic killed by russians in July 2024 on the Kherson front. It cannot be compared with the exhaustion of other family members who stayed faithful to God and to the values of freedom, about which the West now raises increasingly dubious questions, and who stayed faithful to the point of death for the sake of us, the tired civilians. Deadly tired lives given for merely tired ones.

Our fatigue pales beside the physical and emotional exhaustion of five other members of our family, Andrii, Valentyn, Tymofii, Andrii and Roman, who are serving at the front right now and defending our freedom, our lives, and our right to rest and pray and build up the church inside our weary civilian existence. How could we say to friends and relatives and defenders who have been in the trenches for more than three years: I am tired, so please wait there in your foxhole under russian fire, often without adequate food and water, while I rest here? How do you imagine that sounds to them?

So yes, we are tired, and this fatigue is nothing beside theirs. And it is more than my own private exhaustion, since I am one of tens of thousands of people, seminary leaders and professors and pastors and volunteers among them, who serve our church and our country not only through pious singing and prayer but through many other forms of active ministry. I am one of hundreds of thousands whose families have lost someone to murder, to captivity, or to that absolute absence we call missing.

I know that not all of our partners and friends abroad appreciate the state of this fatigue, its tone, its endlessness. The only way to stop communicating it would be to fall silent altogether, because whatever we say and whatever we do in our work of developing church leaders and theology, the exhaustion runs like blood through everything.

Jesus paid the highest price for our redemption precisely in a state of deadly fatigue. From Gethsemane to the road to Golgotha: the garden where He sweated blood in exhaustion, praying that the cup might pass; the scourging that left Him barely recognizable; the weight of the cross that required Simon of Cyrene’s help; the nails, the mockery, the darkness. None of it looks or sounds pleasant even in the Gospels, let alone in our own lives now. And on the cross, in His mortal exhaustion, He cried out asking why the Father had forsaken Him, which does not fit our tidy question about what Jesus would do. His exhaustion ended only with the words it is finished.

For myself, I pray that fatigue will not stop me from helping our defenders, assisting those in need, and supporting volunteers and others. And I am not ashamed, in this state, to ask you for prayer and also for financial support. There are things we can only be honest about with one another when we are this tired, since exhaustion strips every mask off our spirituality, and what remains is only what is real, which in my case has nothing to do with money.

What matters to us today, then, when we grow weary of a world that keeps losing its mind along with its politicians, and of the erosion of democratic freedoms, and of the fact that more and more Christians are ready to trade democracy for the protection of depersonalized Christian values through authoritarian leaders and systems? What is our fatigue directed toward? Better to be tired from serving God and taking part in His mission. Better to be broken in service than in sin. Better to be exhausted from helping people broken by war than from working only for our own happiness, whatever that would even mean here.

Please do not take offense at this letter, written in a state of prolonged fatigue that I did not choose and that chose me. A candle burns until it burns out, and not until it grows tired of burning. This does not cancel the Sabbath or our need for occasional physical and emotional rest, and in wartime such rest counts for very little against what drains our strength day and night. So do not pay too much attention to our tired tone either, since it will be with us for a long time, and to sound un-tired would mean ceasing to be ourselves here and now. The time will come, perhaps only after the war ends, whatever that will mean, when we will rest and try to learn how to live again without the fatigue of war in our souls and our minds and our words.

What I ask instead is that you pray for God to send us those Simons of Cyrene who will help us carry the cross to the place of our own crucifixion and of the embodiment of God’s mission, people ready to share our tiredness and to keep us, tired alongside them under a Palestinian sun, from fleeing the road we are on. This is not about rejecting ordinary rest or claiming that vacations are unnecessary. It is about endurance in a calling when the endurance and the fatigue themselves become part of that calling.

We ask for Simons of Cyrene because we know the difference between holy fatigue and the weariness that destroys a soul. There was another fatigue present on that road to Golgotha, the weariness of the Roman soldiers who drove the nails, mocked the dying King, and cast lots for His garments under the same scorching sun. They were tired too: tired of the routine brutality of occupation, exhausted by the weight of their armor in the heat, worn out by another day of state-sanctioned violence. Their hands ached from the hammer, their throats were parched from shouting orders and insults, their backs strained from the physical labor of an execution. Yet theirs was the fatigue of those who serve darkness, a bone-deep exhaustion that comes from taking life rather than from laying one’s own down, the tiredness of moral numbness, of hearts grown heavy with cruelty, of souls drained by taking part in evil rather than resisting it. Christ’s fatigue led to redemption and theirs led deeper into the dark, since we can grow tired in righteousness or tired in sin, weary from love or weary from hatred, exhausted from building people up or from tearing their lives down in the name of dehumanized Christian values. Those soldiers remind us that not all fatigue is holy, and that some weariness comes from walking away from God rather than toward Him.

We do look forward to that eternal rest where there will be no sin and no death and no tears, and no deadly fatigue either, in the presence of Jesus. Until then we burn like candles in the dark, trusting that our light, however dim with exhaustion, still shows the way toward that rest for the millions of Ukrainians broken by this aggression. Thank you for walking with us in our fatigue, and for understanding that it is a testament to faithfulness under fire rather than a failure. Even when we stumble or fall or fail in your eyes, we try to stand up and stay and move on toward our own hill.

Taras D., Ukraine, with love and fatigue
1203rd day of the ongoing full-scale russian war against Ukraine, and of the institutional silence of russian evangelical churches and seminaries