#BeingHuman. Writing this from a BlaBlaCar on the road out of Kyiv, I received the news that today’s strike on Zaporizhzhia has taken another twelve lives.
In the first four months of 2026, russians killed at least 780 Ukrainian civilians and injured at least 4,352. That means one civilian killed every three hours and forty-one minutes, and one wounded every thirty-nine minutes. And the pace is only increasing.
For us here, these are not statistics but a way of marking the passage of time inside our work and our ministry. Every three hours and forty-one minutes, someone who was alive is gone. Every thirty-nine minutes, someone is wounded. And this does not count the lives and the injuries of our defenders. The pattern continues through sleep, through prayer, through worship, through job duties. If you read this slowly, you will realize that in the course of half a workday, or a single sermon, another life is added to the count.
This is the fifth year of the war, not the fifth month. A child who started first grade when the missiles began is now finishing fifth, and very often those classes happen in bomb shelters, in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and Kharkiv and other cities. That is how we measure time here. The vast majority of Ukrainian children have grown up hearing sirens and explosions. Many young couples have never had a wedding without someone missing or already buried. The machine does not need to move faster, only to keep going, and it has.
The book of Job does not begin with a theology of suffering. It begins with a list. A messenger comes to say that the Sabeans raided the oxen and the donkeys, killed the servants, and that he alone escaped to tell it (Job 1:14–15).
Four messengers, four reports, and the text drives them in like nails: while he was still speaking, another came. The accumulation is the horror. No single one of those four messages destroys Job. What breaks open the meaning of catastrophe is the relentless arrival of the next one before the previous can be heard.
We have been receiving those messages almost hourly, in one form or another, while doing our jobs and our ministry and our seminary work and our volunteering, for 1,532 days.
Lamentations 3 describes what this does to a soul: “I have forgotten prosperity. And I said, ‘My strength and my hope have perished from the Lord’” (Lamentations 3:17–18, NKJV). And a few verses later, out of the same chapter and the same soul: “This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:21–23, NKJV).
Not that they were new. That they are new every morning. New on day five, on day five hundred, on day one thousand, on day 1,532, and on whatever day you happen to read this. God’s mercies come as often as the casualties do, faster than we can count, and most of them are noticed by God alone, because we often cannot recognize them, since this war reaches into your spirituality as well. Which is something people outside Ukraine may not want to hear, and I say it without accusation.
The russian Federation invests in destruction, in funerals, in torture, in rape, in looting. God invests in mornings. Right now we live in the middle of both, and our calling, as long as we are here, is to keep counting both. Every name, every wound, every new day, and every loaf of bread or word shared with someone this war has struck. Our Mission has not changed.
“Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5, NKJV). We are still in the sowing, now on day 1,532 of this terror and of the silence of russian evangelical churches and seminaries.
Keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine
Korets
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