BEING HUMAN

These are my notes for a sermon delivered on 4 August 2025 in the Skelya Church in Rivne, as I go on reflecting on my own spiritual, emotional and theological journey through this war and on what it has done to me. That is why I call this brutal honesty: I am sharing not who I want to be, but who I am here and now.

War does not merely destroy buildings, since it shatters time and space themselves. One moment you are celebrating a neighbor’s return from the combat zone, and the next you are staring at rubble where his house stood yesterday, as happens constantly to displaced people across Ukraine. Through this full-scale war we live in several spiritual territories at once: some of us are still drunk on the early solidarity, others are drowning in despair, and many wander somewhere between rage and resignation.

I know this territory intimately, not as a theological educator observing from a distance but as someone whose soul has been dragged through each of these places repeatedly over the past 1258 days. Elijah knew it too, and his journey from the triumph of Mount Carmel to the whispered revelation of Mount Horeb maps my own wartime pilgrimage with brutal precision, and yours as well, if you are honest about where this war has taken your heart, even from outside Ukraine, where some of you walk the second and third mile with us.

There is no linear progression here. I find myself cycling back from the hard-won wisdom of Horeb into the intoxication of Carmel, and then plummeting again toward the broom tree when another funeral notice arrives on my phone. For Christian leaders working in war-torn regions, recognizing these locations is essential pastoral care rather than an academic exercise, and that includes seminaries and educators. These are not stages of spiritual growth to be rushed through, but the places where God meets His people exactly where they are, including those of us who are supposed to have the answers.

One. Intoxication: Mount Carmel. This is the high of moral clarity that comes with early victories, when everything feels crystal clear: good against evil, us against them, God on our side, and you are drunk on the belief that divine justice will triumph swiftly through some dramatic intervention.

“Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice… Now when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces; and they said, ‘The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!’” (1 Kings 18:38–39, NKJV).

Those first months in 2022 felt like vindication straight from heaven, even unprotected by NATO. The world was watching, and we held the moral high ground. David with his sling faced down Goliath, and international solidarity burned as bright as altar fire, so that every successful defense felt like divine endorsement, as though God Himself were choosing sides and had chosen ours. The moral clarity was intoxicating, since good and evil finally wore unmistakable uniforms, and social media became our mountaintop, where testimonies of miraculous escapes and heroic resistance confirmed what we desperately needed to believe: that we were the prophets of freedom and they were the servants of a false god of traditional Christian values.

The fire fell. The people cheered. Justice seemed inevitable. But Carmel’s flame burns bright and brief, and the same crowd that shouted “The Lord, He is God” scattered once the real testing began. This is what we in the Ukrainian church prefer not to talk about, our own grey zone, since moral clarity about the aggression did not automatically transform the power structures behind closed doors.

Two. Shock: Jezebel’s threat, and evil that refuses to yield. “Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time’” (1 Kings 19:2, NKJV).

The message arrives like a blade between the ribs, and here comes the gut-punch realization that moral victory changes nothing on the ground. Evil does not surrender after public humiliation, it turns vicious and personal, learns your name, finds your address, studies your children’s faces.

This is the blow many Ukrainians felt when the war did not end after that first wave of global outrage, when Bucha and Mariupol and Izium did not stop the atrocities, when international attention did not translate into protection. We are still screaming to a watching world: protect our skies.

Abstract evil suddenly had your phone number, as it did for Anatolii Raichynets of the Ukrainian Bible Society and for many others. The transition from collective triumph to individual terror creates a psychological whiplash that leaves us feeling betrayed by our own expectations of how divine justice ought to work in real time, rather than abandoned by God exactly. Why does righteousness not shield us from retaliation? Why does doing the right thing make you a target?

Three. Despair: flight to Beersheba, and the feeling of abandonment. “And when he saw that, he arose and ran for his life, and went to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there” (1 Kings 19:3, NKJV).

Beersheba was the last familiar outpost before the wilderness, where ordinary community still functioned and explanations still made sense. And even there something broke in Elijah, in four words that carry a devastating weight: he left his servant there. In fleeing he was trying to abandon his prophetic identity along with his location, since he was supposed to be the one others looked to, and now he could not even care for his closest companion. This is the painful shift from leading to simply staying alive, and the guilt-ridden abandonment of people and responsibilities you can no longer carry.

War forces these impossible geometries of love. Parents put children on trains toward places they have never seen. Community leaders evacuate. The networks of mutual care dissolve under the acid of individual survival. And there is a deep grief in this stage, perhaps a postponed one, since we mourn the person we were before the invasion, the one who had emotional resources to share, who operated out of strength rather than desperate need, who could afford to care for others instead of clinging to his own breath.

Four. Despair: under the broom tree, and the prayer that it is enough. “And he prayed that he might die, and said, ‘It is enough! Now, Lord, take my life, for I am no better than my fathers!’” (1 Kings 19:4, NKJV).

Beyond the edge of civilization sits the broom tree, with barely enough shade to survive under, and you survive anyway. It is enough, Elijah says, and his cry carries the weight of absolute limitation, what the Hebrew calls rav, simply enough.

For us this rarely means wanting physical death. It means being tired of consciousness itself, tired of hoping, weary of the whole human project in a world that keeps answering violence with violence, funerals with funerals, shelling with shelling. Many war-weary souls recognize this territory, where the relentless labor of hope becomes unbearable. Why resist, if evil regenerates like cut weeds? And Elijah’s comparison with his ancestors reveals the deeper wound: previous Ukrainian generations faced the same darkness, so what has fundamentally changed, and what is the point?

The broom tree offers no answers, only the thinnest mercy: shade enough not to die today, and perhaps tomorrow, though we do not know what comes next. Sometimes that is sufficient grace.

Five. Provision: the angel’s touch, and grace at the threshold. “Then as he lay and slept under a broom tree, suddenly an angel touched him, and said to him, ‘Arise and eat.’ Then he looked, and there by his head was a cake baked on coals, and a jar of water” (1 Kings 19:5–6, NKJV).

When divine intervention finally arrives, it comes as bread and water rather than as systematic theology, as a friendly touch before any words, as provision before explanation.

This is precisely how hope returns in war zones through our People of the Bridge, not through dramatic signs but through the daily practical care of volunteers. Unexpected help with rent. A meal from neighbors who barely have enough themselves. Medicine that appears through some bureaucratic miracle. News that someone you love is still breathing, even after you have already lost others.

The angel comes twice, patient with Elijah’s need to rest between provisions: arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you. Grace prepares us for futures we cannot yet imagine, equipping us for pilgrimages we do not know we will take. There is something deeply human in this materialized divine patience, since God understands that recovery is not linear, that sometimes we need to lie back down after eating, and that healing happens in fits and starts.

Six. Pilgrimage: forty days toward an encounter. “So he arose, and ate and drank; and he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights as far as Horeb, the mountain of God” (1 Kings 19:8, NKJV).

One meal sustains forty days of travel, which is the kind of arithmetic that only works inside grace. Horeb was not an escape from trauma but the place where trauma could turn into wisdom, and unlike the panicked flight to Beersheba, this movement through the desert was deliberate, sustained, and directed toward an encounter. For those who survive a war, it parallels the slow work of moving from reaction toward meaning: returning to creative work, building a Community of Hope, patiently trying to weave sense out of senselessness. It cannot be rushed, and the forty days echo other biblical periods of testing, Noah’s flood, Moses on Sinai, Jesus in the wilderness, where some things require extended time rather than a momentary revelation, however much we would prefer the second.

Seven. Transformation: Horeb’s cave and the sound of sheer silence. “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains… but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12, NKJV).

The cave at Horeb contains the most radical revelation of the whole journey, since wind and earthquake and fire, all the expected manifestations of divine power, were explicitly rejected as the place where God essentially is. Instead He appeared in a voice of thin quiet, and this subverts everything we expect about how God ought to operate in a crisis. His truest presence is not found in the interventions we plead for, the miraculous escape, the sudden victory that would vindicate our suffering, the rescue from death and wounds. He speaks instead in the whisper that accompanies us through the ordinary aftermath of extraordinary trauma.

Learning to detect that voice requires not new senses but renewed ones. It is there in the sound of children playing in Zaporizhzhia after the sirens. In neighbors who keep replacing windows in Kherson and rebuilding in Kharkiv and Kyiv after each bombing. In the stubborn and painful choice to remain human despite everything designed to strip that away.

The God of Horeb does not always stop the wind and the earthquake and the fire. He promises to be present in the silence that follows, speaking words that can only be heard by those who have walked the full distance from Carmel’s certainty through the wilderness of doubt to Horeb, and back again.

So what? Elijah’s spiritual geography gives me an essential navigation tool for ministry in war-affected regions, since the people we serve are not all in the same place and each place asks for different care. Some are processing Jezebel’s shock. Those wrestling with early disillusionment need wisdom about sustainability. Those deep under the broom tree need patient presence more than answers. Those in Horeb’s cave need companionship while they learn to hear God’s voice in an unprecedented silence.

And most importantly, this journey from moral triumph through trauma to transformation is a deep expression of hope and faith rather than a spiritual failure, however it may look to outsiders. The God who meets His people at every stage is forming not only individual resilience but the collective wisdom of a Community of Hope, in which everyone stands somewhere between Carmel and Horeb, and that kind of spiritual intelligence emerges only from walking the whole distance from the thunderstorm of one mountain to the sheer silence of the other.

In that silence our war-torn souls discover something unexpected: not the God we thought we needed, the One who would dramatically end our suffering, but the God we actually need here and now, whose presence does not depend on favorable circumstances, whose voice persists through the aftermath, and whose love proves more durable than the forces arrayed against it in our souls and our lives.

That may not be the victory we prayed for at Carmel. For those who continue the journey, it is enough. Taras D., Ukraine
1258th day of the ongoing full-scale unprovoked russian war