On 12 December 2025, Ernest Clark, the CTO of Mesa Global, and I took part in the interfaith forum “Called to Freedom,” organized by the Institute for Trauma Healing around Galatians 5:13–14: “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty” (NKJV). The forum gathered more than two hundred faith-based counselors, advisors, facilitators and church ministers who provide pastoral care.
The two days focused on equipping those who walk alongside trauma survivors, particularly people affected by this war, with theological and practical foundations for sustainable ministry. Participants engaged biblical models of presence, examined the balance between compassion and self-preservation, and reflected on trauma-informed pastoral care rooted in faith. Through seminars, workshops and shared testimony, the forum aimed to strengthen the capacity of Ukrainian faith communities to respond to ongoing collective trauma and constant retraumatization with both truth and grace, and it became a critical conversation about how the Church can embody freedom amid suffering without demanding premature forgiveness or abandoning the call to justice. The Institute for Trauma Healing is a partner of Mesa Global in developing resources for faith-based counseling, and of Scholar Leaders in the Vital Sustainability initiative. Ernest greeted the participants on behalf of Mesa Global and our partners, and I had the honor of giving the closing lecture, “Theology in Action: Freedom to Hear the Other Without Fear of Losing Yourself.”
The paradox of presence. Dear friends and fellow travelers on the path of Jesus, thank you for the chance to discuss what may be the greatest challenge for all of us who accompany people in distress during this war. My question today is not about methods or techniques, but about how we ourselves stand before another person’s pain, another person’s story, another person’s way of seeing the world.
When someone comes to us with the trauma of war, they bring their whole worldview with them. Their questions to God. Their anger. Their pain. And here we meet a paradox: to help at all, we have to be present in that space, and there is no other option. Yet presence in someone else’s space always awakens an existential fear in us. What if their pain swallows me? What if their questions shake or ruin my own faith?
That fear is real, and I feel it with particular intensity, because this is not an abstract subject for me. Six of my relatives have been killed. My nephew Oleksandr was shot by pro-russian snipers in February 2014, and my brother Andrii, a military medic, was killed during the full-scale invasion in July 2024. Five of the people I love are at the front right now. When I sit with a widow or with the mother of a fallen soldier, I cannot say “I understand” unless it is true, and precisely for that reason I know how hard it is to maintain presence when you are standing in that bleeding space yourself.
Because of this fear we usually do one of two things: we wall ourselves off from the other, or we dissolve into them. Neither is presence. So I want to look at this through the theology of incarnation, at a path where we can hear another person without fear of losing ourselves, because our identity is rooted in the One who is large enough to hold us both.
Kenosis: self-emptying without loss of identity. Paul writes that Christ “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7, NKJV). Notice the paradox: He emptied Himself toward human pain without ceasing to be God. He entered the space of human experience with all its limitation and temptation, and did not dissolve into it. Hebrews puts it this way: “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are” (Hebrews 4:15, NKJV). He wept with those who wept, and remained the One who could say, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
This is the first foundation for me: the ministry of presence does not require me to surrender myself. When a caregiver fears that another’s pain will swallow him, it often means his identity rests on fragile ground, on certainty in answers and a sense of control. The Christology of kenosis teaches me something else, that my identity lies in belonging to the One who is greater than my questions and my answers alike.
Covenantal presence. The second foundation is presence understood as covenant. When God says, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you… When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned” (Isaiah 43:2, NKJV), He is not promising the absence of water and fire. He is promising His presence.
That is a radical shift, since we often assume our role is to supply answers and relieve pain, whereas covenantal presence says that my role is to be there, to remain where others have left. And it does not mean losing my boundaries. God remains God. The person remains a person. Between them a bond is established that does not break. In my ministry it means I can be present with someone’s pain without making it my goal to overcome that pain for the sake of my own comfort.
Embodied listening. The third element is listening understood through the incarnation. When the Word became flesh, that was an act of divine listening, undertaken voluntarily. God did not send a treatise about suffering; He entered the space of human vulnerability and lived it fully from inside, all the way to death, and into the hell of our own souls.
But notice that Christ entered human experience with somewhere to enter from. He came from the Father and knew He was returning to the Father, and His identity did not depend on acceptance or rejection by people, by disciples who left Him alone in the garden, by high priests and scribes. For me this means that to listen truly to another person, I need to know my own rootedness, my own space with the Father from which I can step into someone else’s space.
These three foundations are lived realities rather than abstractions, and I see them throughout Scripture in people who stood in the gap between heaven and earth, between their own identity and another’s pain. Let me look at five of them, since each shows a different aspect of being fully present without losing oneself, of removing your sandals on holy ground while knowing whose you are.
Moses at the burning bush. Moses sees a bush that burns without being consumed. He approaches, and God says, “Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5, NKJV). Come closer, and acknowledge the holiness of this space.
Notice what follows. God calls him to enter the pain of an enslaved Israel, and Moses answers with five questions, beginning with the most fundamental: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” (Exodus 3:11, NKJV), which means going back to the place where he broke. That is the question of every caregiver who fears being consumed: who am I to enter this burning space, and what if I lose myself there? God’s answer is simple: “I will certainly be with you” (Exodus 3:12, NKJV). Moses’ identity rests in the presence of the One who burns without being consumed rather than in his own strength or his own answers.
The bush teaches him what he will later model for us: you can stand close to a pain that does not burn out without becoming that pain yourself. Moses did not become the bush and did not try to burn along with it. He kept his identity and stood close enough to hear God’s voice, because that identity was rooted in “I AM” and not in “I can fix this.”
Job’s friends. For the first seven days they simply sat with him in silence, “for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13, NKJV). This is one of the best examples of presence in Scripture. The problem began when they opened their mouths, since fear of his questions made them wall themselves off behind answers. But in those first seven days they were witnesses to pain, sitting in uncertainty without fleeing, keeping both their identity and their presence, right up until they tried to protect God in Job’s hearing.
Jesus in Gethsemane. He tells the disciples, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me” (Matthew 26:38, NKJV). He does not ask them to solve His problem or offer explanations, only to be present. Then He goes a little farther and prays.
The lesson for me is that Jesus invites closeness and not too much closeness. People need our presence and probably not our intrusiveness; they want to know we are there, and they need room for their own struggle and doubt and fear. The disciples fell asleep, and Jesus was disappointed and did not condemn them, because He understood their limits. We have a right to our limits and to our fatigue, and this destroys neither our identity nor our relationships with the people who truly love us.
Stephen before the Sanhedrin. They “gnashed at him with their teeth” (Acts 7:54, NKJV), and he looks up and sees the glory of God, remaining rooted in a reality larger than the stones about to be thrown. His whole sermon was one long prophetic rebuke, naming centuries of resistance to God’s messengers, which is prophetic faithfulness that refuses to call evil good rather than any soft presence. And the same man, with his last breath, prays, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin” (Acts 7:60, NKJV).
How is that possible? Because his identity was anchored in an open heaven, and their stones could not shake it. He could speak a hard truth without needing their acceptance, neither consumed by their hatred nor walled off from their humanity, and this is what freedom means: the ability to be fully present to another’s sin and violence without losing yourself.
Notice too who was there holding the coats. Saul, the future Paul. Stephen’s witness, his ability to remain himself while present even to his murderers, planted a seed that would bear fruit later. He never saw that fruit and died not knowing what his presence would accomplish, and his freedom became a testimony that pursued Saul all the way to Damascus. That presence was possible because he knew who stood at the right hand of God, and from there he could offer truth and grace together, without either collapsing into the other.
Paul and Timothy. In his final letter Paul writes to a frightened and doubting Timothy, and instead of telling him to stop being afraid he reminds him of “the genuine faith that is in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice” (2 Timothy 1:5, NKJV), pointing to an identity rooted deeper than the present fear.
Here the theology of presence reveals something profound: those who suffer more can be compassionate toward those who suffer less, not because their suffering makes them superior, but because their rootedness in God frees them to see beyond their own pain. Think of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa. While Simon carries His cross, Jesus, bleeding and stumbling toward death, turns to the weeping women and says, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children” (Luke 23:28, NKJV). He does not comfort the soldiers who mock Him and does not try to reach the leaders who condemned Him, and He can be present to these women because His identity does not depend on being rescued or vindicated.
This is exactly what Paul does with Timothy. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV). He does not minimize Timothy’s fear; he points to a larger reality, not in order to deny the fear but to name the space in which pain can be borne. And he does this from prison, awaiting execution. His suffering is objectively greater than Timothy’s anxiety, and he neither loses himself in identification with Timothy’s pain nor walls himself off in bitterness about his own. He remains Paul, anchored in Christ, and from there he can speak words that sustain, present to a lesser suffering without resentment or comparison. This is inner freedom: to suffer greatly and still be able to witness another’s pain, because your identity does not depend on a hierarchy of suffering.
Monday morning. We have looked at the foundations and at how they were lived. But the real question is how any of this works on a Monday morning when a traumatized veteran sits across from you, or when a widow’s anger at God shakes your own faith. Here is what has emerged from my own ministry, offered as a way of being rather than as techniques to master. When I sit with someone in bleeding pain, while carrying my own, I feel four temptations pulling at me at once.
The temptation to rescue. When a veteran tells his story, I do not rush to say that God is in control. I say thank you for trusting me, and I stay inside the difficulty. When a widow says she cannot believe in God’s goodness, I do not defend God. I say, tell me more. When a displaced person asks where God was when the missile hit his home and killed his family, I say that I do not know, and that I struggle with this myself. This is not a rejection of theology, but a rejection of a triumphalist theology imposed at the wrong moment. Freedom to hear another person begins here, in trusting that my role is to be present rather than to fix, and this is kenosis, the emptying that paradoxically preserves my identity.
The temptation of complete identification. “I understand what you are feeling” is often more about me than about the other person. My nephew was killed on the Maidan in 2014 and my brother in the Kherson region in 2024. Four more of our family are dead. When someone tells me about loss, I am tempted to say that I understand, and I try not to, because this is their time, their space, their story. Like Moses, who did not become the bush and stood close enough to hear. That distance gives people freedom to speak, since they do not have to account for my pain, and I enter as a guest with my sandals off.
The temptation to abandon boundaries out of a fear that boundaries mean abandoning love. But Jesus withdrew to pray in Gethsemane, and He sent crowds away. When you accompany hundreds of traumatized people while five of your own are at the front and six are buried, boundaries are not a luxury, since they are what allow you to keep serving at all. I have the right to say that I cannot right now, and my boundaries let me be more present, not constantly, but with quality. This is covenantal presence in practice: God remains God, I remain myself, and the bond does not break.
The challenge of speaking in your own voice when the time comes. When I sit with my mother, who lost her son, and she asks why, I cannot hide behind a cliché. And I can say: mama, I do not know why, and the God I have met weeps with you and with me and with our family, and I have seen this at the cross. That is a witness from a real place rather than an answer that closes the question, like Stephen’s vision of an open heaven even as the stones fell. This is embodied listening: you speak from where you have stood with God, from your own burning bush, and your voice carries authority because you have been present to God and to your own pain rather than because you have answers.
These four movements are one integrated practice rather than separate techniques. This is the freedom we are after: to be fully present to another’s burning bush without becoming the bush, to enter the fire knowing that my identity is held in hands larger than the flames.
Freedom rooted in Christ. Let me return to where I began, to the freedom to hear another person without fear of losing yourself. I named the existential fear we all feel, that another’s pain will swallow us and their questions will unravel our faith, and I said that we respond by walling ourselves off or dissolving into them, and that neither is presence. We have seen a third way.
Where does this freedom come from? Not from techniques, though techniques matter, and not from experience, though experience teaches. It comes from knowing that our identity lies in belonging to the One who is greater, rather than in our answers or our control or our capacity to fix. And that is why we can enter the darkest places without fear. Not because we will come out unchanged, since we will change, but because we know who we are at a deeper level, and we know where we came from and where we return.
So what have I learned to do? I invest in my own presence before God, which is my burning bush, my space with the Father, since I cannot give what I have not received, and I cannot witness a fire if I have never taken off my sandals. I look for community and supervision, because Moses had Aaron and Paul had co-workers even in prison, and I need witnesses who can tell me this is holy ground when I forget. I remind myself that I am a witness to Christ rather than Christ: He rescues and I accompany, He bears the weight and I stand alongside, and that is freedom rather than weakness. And I try to trust the process, since my presence plants seeds. Stephen never saw what his witness planted in Saul. Moses never saw the promised land. I may never see the fruit, or the end of this war. But God sees, and that is enough.
Thank you for your ministry of presence. For standing close to burning bushes. For sitting in silence with those whose grief is very great. For withdrawing when you need to. For weeping with those who weep while remembering who stands at God’s right hand.
May the God who emptied Himself without losing Himself, who promised presence rather than escape, who listened out of His rootedness in the Father, give us strength to be present for others. Not as people who have all the answers, but as people who know the One who is greater than all our questions. Not as people who never change, but as people whose identity is held secure in hands larger than the flames.
Taras Dyatlik
12 December 2025, Kyiv
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