BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman? THURSDAY 2026… “This is my body, which is broken for you.” I used to read this once a month. Now I see it every day… Jesus gathered His disciples for their Last Supper together in a borrowed room. Not His own home (He didn’t have one), but a space someone else gave him. It is not just a detail in the Gospel story. It is a fact that opens up for me today as a theology of borrowed space…

We in Ukraine know this feeling, not abstractly, but physically, in our bodies. Most acutely in the frontline cities of the south and east, on the left bank of the Dnipro: Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and many other cities (like Kyiv, Vinnitsya, Lviv, and hundreds of villages). There, people and our ministry partners live in a permanent state of “between.” Between the whistle of a missile or the sound of a Shahed drone and the explosion. Between the silence after the blast and the first cry of the wounded. Between the end of the air raid siren and the moment you can bring your children home from the shelter. Between the notification of a death and the body brought back “on a shield,” like my brother Andriy. Between the words “missing in action” and “confirmed dead,” or “still not found,” or “in captivity.” Between the last phone call from the front and the long silence that follows, there is no longer any promise of anything good. 

Between who you were before the war and who you have become, and between those two people, there is an abyss. Between the faith you once had and the faith you carry now, which makes no sense to those who haven’t lived what you have lived. Between the prayer you can still say and the one you can no longer pray, because you have no words for it, or no strength left to look for them. Between the desire to keep living and the guilt of that desire, when there is so much ongoing death and destruction around you. Between the fifth year of this war and the first year after it ends, which may come someday, but cannot be seen yet, and will not be seen for a long time.

This space of “between” is the borrowed space where Jesus invites us to His table to have our feet washed and to break bread with Him. Your home in this borrowed space is no longer safe. You borrow other people’s walls to shelter behind during Russia’s mass attacks. You look for somewhere to hide your children. 

You also look for borrowed space in the souls of partners outside Ukraine. Their prayer, their willingness to stay close, their readiness to walk not a second but a third and fourth mile with you, that is also borrowed space. Temporary, but real. Often given as a gift, but temporary. And in that space too, Jesus invites us to His table to wash our feet and break bread with us. Nearly four million internally displaced people in Ukraine have lost their homes. Nearly six million Ukrainians living abroad permanently occupy borrowed space. Another six million live in frontline territories where any night can move you from “I have a home” to “I am looking to borrow someone else’s walls.”

So I remind myself this Thursday: we, God’s children in Ukraine, are first of all standing at the very heart of Christ’s own tradition, which begins in a borrowed room. We are not an exception to the norm. We are at the center of it.

He took a towel and began to wash feet. Dirty, tired feet of people who would soon run away. He washed them, knowing how the night would end. A body that serves with full knowledge of the consequences, not from naivety, but from choice. I think of volunteers who, for five years, have carried other people’s grief on their shoulders without permission to stop or rest (like the People of the Bridge community). Though many say they are exhausted, that they are fading, becoming invisible. I think of pastors who conduct funerals for people younger than their own children… again, and again, and again. Of military and civilian doctors and medics whose hands no longer shake, but whose eyes still do. Their bodies know what their minds have not yet had time to process. Jesus washed exactly those kinds of feet… feet that later that same night would carry their owners away from the Garden of Gethsemane.

Then Jesus took the bread. And said: “This is My body, which is broken for you.” In pre-Easter Ukraine in 2026, these words are not a liturgical formula. They are a description of a reality that is hard to look at without looking away.

The bodies of defenders killed at the front. The bodies of the missing, nowhere to be found, yet present everywhere, in every thought of their families. Bodies in Russian captivity, where being broken is deliberate, systematic, and carried out by Russian torturers with satisfaction. Bodies of the wounded who return without limbs, without sight, without who they used to be in peacetime. Bodies of elderly parents killed not by a bullet but by waiting… heart attacks, and strokes from the knowledge that their child is out there, or will not come back. Bodies of civilians wounded and killed every night in apartments, hospitals, on streets, and in cars. And the bodies of families… broken by waiting, by absence, by a funeral without a body, or by a body brought back “on a shield” that you recognize and don’t recognize at the same time.

On July 22, 2024, I stood over Andriy’s body. Brought by my friend (from Dnipro), from Odesa, “on a shield,” in a refrigeration chamber. A broken body of my beloved brother. I will not find words to describe it, and I will not try. Some things can only be described by silence. But I know one thing: in that moment, the words “This is My body, which is broken for you” stopped being theology for me… and became that broken body of my brother…

Jesus made the choice of brokenness. The disciples did not understand it then. We struggle to understand it now. Because nobody likes a broken body. People are horrified by it. They look away from it. It is uncomfortable. It destroys the illusion of control, our own and God’s. Andriy did not choose to be killed. But he chose to defend our country and people. And in that choice, there is something I cannot name other than eucharistic. There is a difference between being broken by violence and being broken by choice. The first is a deliberate act of criminal violence. The second is the result of a choice made freely. I think the Church has not yet learned to properly understand and honor this difference in the causes of brokenness among the living… not only among the killed, the dead, and those celebrated as martyrs or heroes. Among the living.

In most of our evangelical churches, we break bread once a month. Perhaps now, in the fifth year of this Russian Christian terrorist war, we should do it every day. Not as a ritual, but as memory. Memory of Christ’s broken body. And of the broken bodies of those around us. They are not an illustration. They are realities that await our thoughtful and fully human gaze. Not a turned-away gaze. A direct one, without looking away.

At that same table sat Judas. Jesus knew it. And still He reached out and gave him bread. Not from naivety, with full knowledge of what was about to happen. And quietly said: “What you are going to do, do quickly.”

After 2014, we kept sitting at the table with Russian pastors, lecturers, seminary rectors, partners in theological education, and mission. We ate together, prayed together, sang together, and worked together. We hoped. We did not want to believe that most of them (and yes, I remember those who pay the price of faithfulness to the Truth) would do what they eventually did. Not all at once, but gradually: through the silence of betrayal, through justifying aggression, through the mantra of “it’s a complicated topic” and “it’s not so simple,” through supporting not Putin personally but the Russian regime that kills our children in the name of traditional Christian and family values… in the name of the messianic role of the Russian people in the face of the “diabolical” West and “not-quite-Ukraine.” We heard familiar arguments: it’s frightening, they might fine us. It’s frightening, they might ban us from meeting at home to pray or read the Bible. It’s frightening to go against the system. This often sounded like an equation: the fear of being persecuted for truth was equated with the suffering of the cross itself, as if the two were the same. As if the cost of silent betrayal were only a matter of reputation in Putin’s eyes and in Russian society, just to prove that “we too are traditional Russian religion.”

“Yes, you are being killed and tortured, but please understand us: they might ban us from meeting in homes to pray,”this is from recent news from Russia… Our parents in Soviet times did not ask the authorities for permission to meet at home. They met. And paid for it with their freedom, with persecution, often with their lives. For Truth. My own family, too. And they not only met, but they also printed Bibles and Christian literature underground. They were broken, too. But they do not compare today’s fear of a Russian fine with Russian torture and rape in the basements of Bucha and Kherson. Because they know the price of freedom and the price of faithfulness to the Truth.

But I cannot speak about betrayal from the outside alone. Because I also know what it is to betray. Not like Judas, with conscious calculation, with thirty pieces of silver from those who promised to protect traditional values. More often, like Peter. From fear. From despair. From exhaustion that makes you smaller than you want to be. From losing your grip on what is happening around you and inside you.

Peter did not plan to deny Him. He simply ran from the Garden of Gethsemane along with the others and found himself standing by someone else’s fire, warming himself alongside those who also claimed to know who they were. And something in him was afraid before he had time to think, from a simple question by a servant girl: “You were with him, weren’t you?” And then a rooster crowed.

Betrayal and flight from Christ in wartime is not an abstract sin. It is the specific moment when you can no longer pray, and you don’t. When you stop going to the place where the truth hurts. When you choose the warmth of someone else’s fire over the cold of the place where He is suffering. When you keep putting off the conversation with God, because you don’t know what to say to Him after everything you have seen and witnessed. When survivor’s guilt becomes a wall between you and Him. When the fifth year of Russian Christian terror wears your soul down to the point where you can no longer tell: has He gone silent, or have you stopped being able to hear? That is the flight. Not to any one place, but away from yourself, from who you are in the moment when the rooster crows.

The rooster’s crow is a trigger. Not only for Peter. For anyone who stood by someone else’s fire and chose warmth over truth. Who knew what needed to be said and stayed silent. Who felt something inside go cold with fear, and ran. Not toward Him. Not to the place where He is suffering. But to a solitary place where you can weep without meeting anyone’s eyes. Even His.

The difference between Judas and Peter is not in what they did. Both betrayed. Both ran. The difference is in where each of them went with his shame. Judas went to the temple, returned the money, heard “what is that to us?” and went to a solitary place, where the shame destroyed him. Physically. Peter went to weep bitterly over himself, over who he is without Christ, even though Christ had not abandoned him: it was he who had abandoned Christ. But he did not weep into emptiness… he wept with himself, allowing himself to see his own true face. Peter’s “he wept bitterly” is not weakness. I am sure of this: when he later told the other disciples this, no one laughed. They had all been in the Garden of Gethsemane. They had all run. They all knew the sound of their own rooster.

To borrow yourself a temporary space for weeping (where your own self meets the self of Christ)… it is often the beginning of the road back to Him. But that road begins only when you stop running from who you are in that moment, and instead look into the mirror of your own experience without looking away… until you meet His eyes. His gaze.

And then… Gethsemane. The dark garden after the Supper. The disciples are sleeping, even here, even now, even right beside Him when He prays: “Not My will, but Yours.”

A prayer that did not change the circumstances. That did not protect from arrest, from torture, from a night of interrogation; that did not stop the flight of those with whom He had broken bread. The cup did not pass… despite the force of the prayer, despite sweat falling like drops of blood. The prayer did not make things easier. Things got harder. More frightening. More alone. More suffering…

But the prayer sustained the One Who prayed. Not by changing the reality, but by changing His relationship to it. It is the hardest form of freedom in the face of suffering: to choose the right attitude and direction, knowing it will bring pain… even greater pain, unimaginable pain. And to pray not because everything has become clear, but because there is One you trust more than your own fear of the unknown… after you have already heard the sound of your own rooster…

We pray in the fifth year of this war, often without words, often through tears, often without the answer we want to hear about our killed, our missing, those in Russian captivity, our displaced loved ones, and especially those at the front, in the very hell of the ongoing Russian Christian terror. But we pray. Even knowing things may not get better, may get worse. And this is not our despair, not the absence of hope. It is our confession that we trust the Father more than our own fears. More than tomorrow, we cannot yet imagine…

Thursday is not over yet. The night is only beginning. It will get worse. There will be more suffering… But we keep praying: “Father, let Your will be done.” Praying, and still learning to make the right choice… here and now, despite the increasing pain… Our Mission has not changed. Keep your children away from war… Prepare yourself for more suffering… Taras D., Ukraine