BEING HUMAN

On October 23, 2026, I spoke in Chicago at a Week of Compassion gathering (the relief, refugee, and development mission fund of the Christian Church [Disciples of Christ]) held at the Disciples Divinity House. I am grateful to Vy Nguyen for arranging the meeting, to Daan Verbaan of Kerk in Actie for our collaboration, and to Marjana Kashchak of the Ukrainian Educational Platform, who shared the evening stage with me. Below is my reflection (the full text) that I offered (in a short form) at the beginning of the gathering.

Today is day 1,703 of russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. I don’t mention this number for effect, since counting the days is simply the most honest way I know to tell you where I come from. I live in Rivne, in the northwest of Ukraine, which is not on the front line, although systematic russian strikes across our region and the whole country mean that no place in Ukraine is really far from it… The question I was given for tonight is a big one: what Christian faith asks of us in the middle of war, and I don’t have a big answer. What I have is a short psalm, which I want to read with you as Eugene Peterson rendered it in “The Message,” because his plain words sound closer to the way people pray in Ukraine today than the polished language of some other traditional translations or of a Sunday service. It is a short prayer, yet it is the one I hear most often at home, even from people who have never read the Bible. I would like to walk through it line by line with you, because almost every line of this psalm has an address in Ukraine…

Long enough, GOD – you’ve ignored me long enough… Where the Hebrew asks “how long?” four times, Peterson renders the first four lines on “long enough,” and so a question turns into something closer to a verdict, which matches what I hear in my thoughts and in Ukraine. In the first months of russia’s full-scale invasion, people asked “why,” but after more than four and a half years I rarely hear “why” anymore… I hear “how long,” and more and more often I hear exactly Peterson’s words: that it has gone on “long enough.”  I saw this move with myself as well during these 1703 days of the russian war: from “Why, Lord?” (an avatar on my Facebook) to “Long enough, Lord”… What matters most to me in these opening lines is the One they are addressed to. The psalmist complains to God rather than about God to someone else, and nobody keeps saying “long enough” to someone he has already given up on, so a complaint brought to God remains a form of trust, angry and tired, but trust all the same… I also notice this movement in my thoughts: complaining about God in the first months of the russian aggression, and now complaining more and more to God Himself… Many of us in Ukraine were formed in traditional evangelical churches where a “spiritual believer” was expected to be grateful and quiet, but the war took that expectation away very quickly, and the psalms give us back a way to stay honest with God without lying to Him. The first thing faith asks of me, as I see it, is this honesty before God, Who knows our hearts beyond our spiritual words, and everything else has to grow from there…

I’ve looked at the back of your head long enough… The second line is the hardest one for me, because the psalmist says he has been looking at the back of God’s head for too long. Many of us in Ukraine, including our families, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, know this from the nights when sirens and explosions go on for hours, when people stay in corridors and basements and hear nothing back from the Lord except the next explosion, and at every single funeral of our fallen fathers, sons, siblings, friends, colleagues, neighbors… It feels like you are trying to reach the face of God, but see only the back of His head… I also often think of the families of the missing (like some of my friends and colleagues), since earlier this year the National Police of Ukraine had more than 114,000 open cases of people missing in this war, and behind each case there is a family living with a phone that may ring or may not. I personally know families who have waited months or even years for the last call from a son or a father before a mission, and I suspect that for them the silence of heaven and the silence of the phone have become hard to tell apart… In that silence we see the back of God’s head, not His face which we seek… and “long enough” is our first thought every morning, long before it could become a theological question…

Long enough I’ve carried this ton of trouble, lived with a stomach full of pain… Then Peterson speaks of carrying a “ton of trouble,” and I take that ton quite literally, because I count it for myself. I keep a war diary, and every month I count, from the official reports of our General Staff and Air Force, every act of russian violence against Ukraine: drones, missiles, guided bombs, shelling, air strikes, killed and injured.. Monthly totals in 2026 range from about 370,000 to almost 450,000, which comes to one every six seconds, day and night, for the whole month… Some people have suggested to me that I count out of hatred for russians, but I count to stay awake, because each of those numbers landed somewhere: on a street, a car, a field, an apartment building, a school, a house, a hospital… and sometimes directly on a person hunted by a drone in what Ukrainians call a “human safari” in near front-line cities, carried out in the name of so-called traditional Christian values… The “stomach full of pain” belongs to the body, and the russian war lives in our bodies as much as in our minds (I wrote about it in May 2025, “The war that moved inside…”). After four years of air-raid sirens and explosions almost every night, the war “learns” to live in our bodies and pushes us  not to hear them, and when the numbers of weaponry, killed, and injured grow too large, the mind wants to stop realizing them. This numbness, the habit of adjusting to every new russian escalation, can look like resilience from the outside, yet… the person inside is slowly losing the ability to grieve, which is one more reason I keep counting…

Long enough my arrogant enemies have looked down their noses at me… The last of the four “long enough” lines speaks of arrogant enemies who look down their noses, and for Ukrainians this is a precise description. The russian full-scale invasion was justified by the claim that there is no separate Ukrainian people, country, language, or identity, so the contempt is part of the violence rather than something added to it. The psalm does not pretend there is no enemy, and it does not soften the word… Although “romantic peacemakers” want us so much to live and pretend there is no enemy, it is only “a sin,” but not human beings from russia who keep killing and destroying us every single day since 2014, not even 2022…

Take a good look at me, GOD, my God… Then David changes direction in his psalm, and the psalmist, who has been staring at the back of God’s head, asks God to turn around and look at him, and human dignity, I think, begins exactly here: being seen and heard. In a war, people (displaced, fallen, injured, killed, missing, in russian captivity) turn into statistics very quickly, sometimes even in my own reports… and the prayer to be seen and heard by God also places a demand on us in Ukraine to keep seeing one another, the soldier and his mother or wife, the displaced family, the family of fallen or missing… To keep someone’s dignity means to keep seeing and hearing them, not as an object of compassion, but as co-fellow human beings… and this is what we ask God to do for us in Ukraine, and what, in the end, I also ask of you. As Ukrainians, we are often reminded by “romantic peacemakers” to care about the dignity of russians, and I still keep wondering who is asking russians (especially evangelicals in russia) to care about the dignity of Ukrainians and their fellow evangelicals…

I want to look life in the eye… The psalmist’s own wish is to look life in the eye, and in Ukraine this means for us refusing two temptations at once. One is to look away, because the news is too heavy and the numbers too large… sleepless nights too many, and explosions countless… the other is to look only at the war and stop seeing the life that goes on around it, children going to school and laughing (although within an hour they may be running to a shelter, screaming), and a neighbor whistling, smoking and drinking coffee as he replaces his windows after another blast (although within a week the windows may be broken again, or the whole apartment or house destroyed). Looking life in the eye means holding both of these together (not only with regard to church ministry), and it also means looking straight at the truth of what has been done to us… evil, by russians, and good, by partners and friends…

So no enemy can get the best of me or laugh when I fall on my face… David then asks for this clear sight so that no enemy can get the best of him or laugh when he falls on his face (either in the face of God, or after he may stumble)… I want to stay with this line, because this is where the word “reconciliation” comes in, and where Ukrainians and “some friends” in the West most often misunderstand each other (please don’t take this personally, unless you happen to be one of the “romantic peacemakers” I will describe in a moment)… I cooperate with the organization Dialogue in Action, and for ten years we have been building spaces where people who disagree can actually talk to each other, across churches and between religious and secular communities, in a society that the russian war has cut in many directions since 2014, and especially since 2022. Because I believe in dialogue and in reconciliation, I am careful with the word… There are people, often good people but at a safe distance, who urge Ukrainians to reconcile with russians here and right now. I sometimes call them, not quite kindly, “romantic peacemakers,” because what they actually ask for is pacification. They suggest that we skip the truth for the sake of peace… reconcile without naming what was done and who did it (I delivered a lecture on it at the Ukrainian Catholic University in March 2026, “Evil Has a Name”). You can recognize them by their vocabulary, since they speak about “the war in Ukraine” and almost never about “russian aggression and terror against Ukraine”; to their ears the first phrase sounds like the language of a peace deal, while the second sounds like escalation. Such a peace would leave the russians (including russian Christians) free to laugh, because the one who has fallen on his face would be asked to stand up and shake hands while he is still being hit, by weapons or by prayers for russian victory, or by celebration of russian special spirituality and mission in the Kingdom of God… David does not skip the naming, and the Bible does not present reconciliation as a feeling that can be demanded from people while the violence is still going on. Reconciliation needs to start with the truth, with the harm to stop (including messianic abuse), and without those two conditions it turns into a word used to keep the victim quiet, which we in Ukraine experience often. Yes, I can imagine reconciliation, hard and painful as it will be, but… I cannot imagine skipping to it, as “romantic peacemakers” suggest… What we can do now is prepare for it, and that preparation begins among ourselves, with our pace, between those who stayed and those who left, and between the families of soldiers and the families who have been spared so far, and so on… If we do not learn to listen to each other inside Ukraine now, there will be nothing to build on later… and in this, I want to say, we do not need the help or presence of “romantic peacemakers” at all…

I’ve thrown myself headlong into your arms… Then the psalm turns without any warning… the psalmist simply says he has thrown himself headlong into God’s arms. Nothing in these lines says his enemy is gone or the waiting is over, and the circumstances remain the same as in the first line; what changes, and this is worth noticing, is the direction of the mind and body, which moves from staring at the back of God’s head to falling into His arms… Behind Peterson’s “arms” stands the Hebrew word “hesed”, which more traditional translations render as “mercy” or “steadfast love.” It is a covenant word for loyalty that does not depend on things going or feeling well, the kind of love that stays when it would be easier to leave… I see this love in many of our partners and friends, who could easily leave us in the fifth year of the full-scale russian war, but still remain next to our churches and pastors, theological educators and leaders… People throw themselves headlong when there is nothing left to hold on to, and in Ukraine I see this kind of faith far more often than the calm and confident kind…

I’m celebrating your rescue… The psalmist is already celebrating a rescue that the first lines never mention, and here the Hebrew tenses matter. He says that he has trusted, looking back, and that he will rejoice and sing, looking forward, while the present remains a “long enough.” His hope rests on a memory (past) and a promise (future) rather than on the evidence of the day (here and now), a day full of sirens, explosions, damage, destruction, funerals, and disruptions. This is what keeps people going in Ukraine, since the optimism so many expect from us has been tested for more than four and a half years and has failed many times.

I’m singing at the top of my lungs, I’m so full of answered prayers… The psalm ends with singing at the top of one’s lungs, full of answered prayers… Churches in Ukrainian cities still open their doors on Sunday morning (or other days for prayers), often after a night in the shelter, and people come in tired and sing anyway, which I understand as “hesed” remembered and passed on; our singing does not deny the night before, and it does not wait for the russian war to end. I won’t pretend that every prayer of mine, or every prayer in Ukraine, has been answered, because… many mothers (including my) prayed for sons who did not come home, yet I have watched people name, at the end of a hard week, one answered prayer, a son who called or a house that a russian drone or missile did not hit (at least not that night, not today), and hold on to it…

So, finally… what faith asks of you, Taras? I want to end my reflections by turning the question toward you (if you allow me), the people in this room. When you read Psalm 13 at a distance from Ukraine, or from other places touched by “armed conflicts,” it is tempting to go straight to the singing and wishing Ukrainians were already there, so that the only questions left are how we stay hopeful and how we forgive, as if the long road in between hardly mattered… But such a way of reading produces what I call “romantic stories of hope,” and I ask you not to hurry us into them, because the psalm itself takes its time, and four lines of “long enough” come (as months or many years) before anyone falls into God’s arms… “Accompaniment,” a word “Week of Compassion” uses for its mission, means staying with someone through the psalm’s first lines of “long enough” instead of rushing to the last lines as soon as possible. I have heard you describe your partnerships as a covenant rather than a transaction, and for us (and others in the contexts of “armed conflicts”) that is “hesed” language: staying when things are not going well, without needing to know the ending first, “long enough,” even when it takes years and years until the Hope comes…

If I can ask anything of you, it is to keep looking at us and other war-affected communities of Hope with open eyes and to say “long enough” with us for as long as it takes, leaving the ending to God… Thank you for your prayers, and keep your children away from war… Taras D, Chicago.