BEING HUMAN

Late evening, back from Kyiv, where I said “see you later” to A. at the railway station as he headed back to the front after a short leave. I hate these see-you-laters. On the way there and back I was reading the story of Saul and Ananias in Acts 9 and journaling.

#BeingHuman. #Melancholy. On walking blind to Damascus, and on the melancholy of walking forward… The Voice that stopped Saul on the road to Damascus gave him no complete roadmap, only the next step: “Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do” (Acts 9:6, NKJV). No detailed instructions from on high, no strategic timeline, no guarantees about comfort or safety. Just a direction, and a promise that clarity would come through another person, Ananias, whose name means that God is gracious.

Look closely at Scripture and you notice something unsettling: God rarely gives complete instructions upfront. Abraham gets “go to a land I will show you,” with no coordinates, no timeline, no detailed explanation of the covenant to come. Moses gets a burning bush and a calling, and the Ten Commandments do not arrive until chapters later. The disciples receive the Great Commission and then have to wait in Jerusalem until power comes from on high. The canonical witness consistently presents faith as movement inside partial knowledge rather than stillness inside complete understanding. Called to speak for God while feeling abandoned by God. Called to offer hope while wrestling with your own despair. Called to lead when you can barely find your own way.

The Damascus story offers no easy comfort, and it does offer honest company. Saul was a religious professional too, trained and educated and confident in his understanding of God’s will, right up to the moment when he was not, at all, when the light struck and left him groping in the dark, needing to be led by the hand to a place where strangers would tell him what to do next.

This is divine wisdom rather than divine cruelty. I cannot carry the weight of knowing everything at once, since the soul breaks under complete knowledge the way an eye goes blind staring into the sun. God portions out revelation according to my capacity to bear it rather than according to my desire to possess it. Which is why there are moments in this war, and I write as a civilian and as a member of a family that has buried its own, when certainty crumbles, when the road ahead disappears into darkness, and all I can do is what Saul did: keep walking toward the city, trembling and wondering, trusting that someone will meet me there and explain what comes next.

War strips away the comforting illusions of progress and meaning, revealing the naked truth of my being-toward-death and my thrownness into a world that offers no inherent explanation, rational or spiritual. This is why I so often find myself walking blind toward Damascus.

The theological scandal is that God speaks and then falls silent for a long time. After the revelation comes the terrible waiting, three days of darkness and hunger and vulnerability, and that silence is divine presence in its most difficult form rather than divine absence. The mystics called it the dark night of the soul, though it might be better understood as the dark night of being yourself. God’s hiddenness is the very condition under which faith becomes possible, rather than a problem for me to solve.

Living through this for 1261 days teaches me something about faith in the Stranger. Not the triumphant, banner-waving kind that comes wrapped in traditional Christian values, but the quiet persistence of putting one foot in front of the other when you cannot see where the path leads. It is the faith that says: even if I do not understand, even if tomorrow brings sirens and massive shelling and new funerals, even if the news grows darker, I will keep walking toward the city, or toward the City itself, should I go through the valley of the shadow.

My fear speaks in what-ifs, an endless catalogue of possibilities that may never materialize and feel utterly real at three in the morning, especially under the sirens. Fear is a skilled storyteller, weaving disaster out of threads of uncertainty. Faith does not deny those what-ifs, and it answers them differently: how do I move forward with an even-if? Even if the worst happens, even if the road is longer than expected, even if the answers do not come in the form I anticipated, how do I keep walking? I am still learning, at my age, that biblical faith operates on even-if logic. Even if the church building is bombed, we will gather in homes. Even if half the congregation flees as refugees, we will serve those who remain. Even if the ministry feels futile, we will continue, because faithfulness is measured by obedience to the Stranger in the next step rather than by outcomes. This is not naive optimism, but the hard recognition that I am not walking alone and that someone waits ahead, even when I do not know who, or Who.

The existential weight of “you will be told what you must do” lies in its passive construction, since I am the recipient of a purpose that comes from beyond me rather than the author of my own meaning. That challenges the modern myth of self-creation, the fantasy that I can bootstrap my way to significance, and it suggests that authenticity requires receptivity to the radical otherness that calls us forward, with vulnerability and honesty, rather than self-assertion.

Sometimes our Ananias comes as a neighbor, or a stranger, or a friend who listens without trying to fix everything. Sometimes it is simply the recognition that morning comes again, if I wait patiently enough for the sunrise, that the heart goes on beating even when it is full of fear, and that small acts of kindness persist even when the world seems to have forgotten how to be kind and merely watches this war.

The beauty of the Damascus story, for me, is not the dramatic revelation but the fact that Saul learned to wait, to sit in uncertainty without demanding immediate answers, and to trust that God’s guidance often arrives through ordinary people rather than through spectacular visions. In a world, and especially a Christian world, that demands instant success and constant forward motion, and I am not arguing here against accountability or planning or the fruits of our ministry, there is something profoundly countercultural about simply walking toward the city and waiting. It requires the bravery of patience rather than the bravery of action.

This is faith in the face of uncertainty, like crossing a cultural boundary to touch an inconvenient and unclean victim. It is hope that persists despite an unclear tomorrow, like binding the wounds of someone who may not survive the night. It is love given freely and without strings, like a Samaritan caring for a Jew who would ordinarily have spat at his feet. It is the quiet confidence that even in blindness, even when I cannot see the purpose or the outcome, I am walking toward a place where the grace of the Stranger waits to meet me.

Seen this way, war itself becomes a kind of Damascus road, forcing me to walk blind through devastation and to wait for the Ananias figures who may never come, or who may come bearing nothing more extraordinary than bread through our People of the Bridge, or the ministry of presence through our visiting partners, or the simple acknowledgment that we are not walking alone and that there is a cloud of witnesses, a Community of Hope, and I belong to it.

The Ukrainian context illuminates all of this through lived experience. When missiles destroy our cities and towns and landmarks, when the displacement of millions fragments our communities, when death visits without warning, the only sustainable faith is the one that says even if to continued walking toward whatever city, or the City, waits ahead, trusting that each Damascus has its Ananias.

None of this describes a small or weak faith. It is the kind of faith that moves mountains one stone at a time, that rebuilds communities one conversation at a time, that heals hearts one day at a time. The road to Damascus is longer than we expected and harder than we hoped, and it continues in every uncertain step we take, in every moment we choose even-if over what-if, and in every act of trust that tomorrow will bring its own form of Ananias. The City behind the city is always ahead, and the Stranger is always waiting there to tell us what we need to know next.

Today, after saying “see you later” to A., that is enough for me. Today. Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine