BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #BrutalHonesty. Reading Psalm 91 when russian drones and missiles break the divine promise of physical protection.

The most spiritually mature thing I can say during this war is not that God will protect us, but that I am having a crisis of faith with every new funeral and every new wave of atrocities, and that this is all right. I am fine. I am still walking the Way, and still reciting Psalm 91.

On 9 July a theologian I hold in high regard, whose books I read, asked me a question I appreciated very much. “If you have a moment, I would love to hear how you can read a psalm like Psalm 91. In your last post you speak of reciting the Psalms from memory. I have often wondered how its bold promises of God’s protection from all harm and evil can be meaningful for believers in places like Ukraine, DR Congo, Myanmar, where God’s people are not at all immune from terrible suffering, violence and death. How can they claim such promises when, at a purely physical and temporal level, they just don’t seem to hold true? What does it mean to take shelter under the wings of the Almighty, with drones flying and people dying, in your own family? Surely the Psalmist himself, like Jesus and Paul, knew that bad things happen to good people, and that being a believer and a lover of God does not mean immunity from suffering, violence and death.”

I hope it is all right to share the question, since it took me almost a month of reflection, journaling, and conversations with friends and colleagues and with the families of the fallen, the missing, and those whose loved ones are in russian captivity.

How do I read “he who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1, NKJV) when hundreds of thousands here have prayed those very words and still fallen to shelling and bullets? That tension between the promise and the reality has forced me to rethink completely what these words actually mean.

The first thing this war taught me was the violent necessity of abandoning what I now recognize as a magical spiritual consciousness. I had to learn to reject the notion that the Psalms function as incantations or protective talismans, since they are not prayerful formulas or word-amulets, though many evangelicals still believe they are at a popular level, and I see it most clearly among the aggressive defenders of depersonalized traditional Christian values. That realization came out of watching local churches where countless people recited this Psalm faithfully and suffered terribly anyway, especially in the east and the south.

But rejecting that magical thinking did not kill my faith, since it transformed it entirely. Where I once looked for transactional guarantees from God, I have found a relationship capable of withstanding uncertainty, and my faith is still becoming a matter of His presence rather than His protection. It has to do with radical trust in His accompaniment through the valley of the shadow, and with the possibility of my own death anywhere and at any time, rather than with any guarantee of physical survival.

The theological struggle has been agonizing. I have tried to reconcile russian brutality with God’s sovereignty and watched my neat constructs crumble under the weight of reality. Sometimes I find comfort in the thought that God does not always answer my prayers as I ask, according to His sovereign will, and then that intellectual refuge collapses again under emotional pressure when I face the psychopathic cruelty of this war, especially since it has taken five people from our close and extended family.

The question that haunts me most is whether there is really no Almighty inside the russian torture chambers. Here all systematic theology proves woefully inadequate, which is why I have often said that systematic theology died in Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The image of sheltering under the wings of the Almighty while Iranian-made drones pass overhead captures exactly the agony that millions of us live with daily.

I have also come to understand that this Psalm has more to do with emotion than with words, which turns the text from a doctrinal manual into a psychological lifeline. During massive shelling, when rational prayer becomes impossible, it becomes an anchor for the soul. I read its words as promises of God rather than as incantations, without requiring their fulfillment here and now, while at the same time holding deep grief for Andrii and for so many others the russians have killed. I keep learning to trust and to grieve at once, to hope and to lament in the same breath.

This war has generated a deep crisis in my faith, and I have learned the spiritual value of unflinching honesty about that, which is exactly what so many people outside dislike in Ukrainian Christians who speak from inside. There are still days when I have to admit I am in a crisis of faith, and days when this Psalm feels more like poetry than promise. Such honesty, I have discovered, is spiritual maturity, the courage to acknowledge doubt rather than maintain a comfortable pretense, even when successful evangelical leaders in safe locations do not appreciate it.

I have seen believers hunt for the conditions of divine protection inside the Psalm: because he loved Me, because he has known My name. And I have learned that this approach risks the cruel logic of blaming victims for insufficient faith, which is precisely what happened when the russians killed Andrii, since some church ministers accused our family of not praying or believing enough. As for others who have died, I can only offer sincere condolences and my presence, because I do not know their hearts or their faith, and I choose not to label them and invite others not to do so either.

We often make the mistake of building whole theological systems on single Psalms or golden verses. For me these texts represent the personal inner experience of specific biblical people rather than universal formulas, and perhaps this Psalm captures the reflection and the longing of its author rather than a guarantee from God. That awareness has freed me from a fundamentalism that turns the complex Word of God into simple promises handed out left and right, and it leaves room for the Psalm to be accurate and limited at the same time, meaningful and insufficient.

The most practical approach I have found is to hold this Psalm as a spiritual and emotional anchor while consciously abandoning any expectation of earthly guarantees, even with five people from our immediate family in the trenches, about whom I cry out to God many times a day. It works more like something you grip during a raging flood: it does not affect the force of the water, and it still gives you hope to hold on even though you may not survive. The Psalm does not alter my reality, it gives me strength to endure it. That is why I keep saying that we are still here, still coping, still moving toward the Mission of God, even in what outsiders would call baby steps.

Painful paradoxes persist beyond any evangelical explanation. Why does James get killed by Herod while Peter is rescued from prison and John lives into old age? Did Peter pray sufficiently, and did James lack faith? Our reality here intensifies the mystery: why do some survive massive shelling, and I write this as one of them, while others are killed, though we all prayed the same Psalm? These questions have no satisfying answers, so I accept the challenge of going on believing while they persist.

I have come to think that the meaning of Psalm 91 in wartime lies precisely in accepting the paradoxes that we as evangelicals want to be rid of, in order to build an image of a victorious Christendom and of mighty prayer warriors who know which spiritual orders to give to God and angels and demons. This Psalm offers me no simple answers and no comfortable guarantees, and it invites me instead into a deeper relationship with the Almighty, one capable of withstanding doubt and crisis and even the absence of answers, in a context where appearance matters more than the self. We learn how to build appearances in many churches and seminaries, and we rarely learn how to build a Community of Hope. This Psalm teaches me to trust God not because everything will end well in earthly terms, in a country betrayed since 1994, but because in our darkest moments I have to learn to walk with the Almighty. In our own gardens of Gethsemane we are always left alone, and that has nothing to do with good or bad.

So the shelter and the wings no longer mean physical protection from Iranian drones, North Korean shells and russian bullets. They mean the assurance that death does not end our story, or mine. My inconvenient questions to God have multiplied far beyond the answers available in conservative evangelicalism, and my faith has not vanished, since it has deepened and grown honest and vulnerable. A faith that withstands brutal reality with brutal honesty still says: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68, NKJV).

I am learning to dwell permanently in the tension between the holy and the profane, between hope and despair, between God’s promise and my own vulnerability. Psalm 91 has become an existential companion for me, a text that walks with me through the valley of uncertainty and even of death, without necessarily delivering me from it because I memorized it, but making sure I do not journey into that darkness alone, into the shining darkness of His presence.

Taras D., Ukraine
1263rd day on which Psalm 91 has not worked as expected for Ukrainians