Ukraine War Relief Visit #2: Silence
Silence
By Susan Montoya
First Presbyterian Church, San Diego, CA
This week The Outreach Foundation will be in Poland and Lithuania to visit church partners who provide spiritual, physical, and emotional support to people displaced due to the war in Ukraine. The first leg of our journey took us on a 10-hour round trip drive to one of the several border crossings between Poland and Ukraine. While there, we met with faithful friends from Kyiv (Ukraine Evangelical Theological Seminary) and Lviv (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church).
We spent the day driving from Warsaw to the Medyka border, a 5-hour drive against the backdrop of the cold and fog of Poland – a metaphor for life in Ukraine – a cold, harsh reality with a future that is hard to see. This visit would take us as close as we are permitted to get to Ukraine. We saw groups of women waiting to get into Ukraine from the grocery shopping they had done at a nearby grocery store. Men ages 18-60 can only cross with special permission so women lift this load.
Police were nervous about our presence, but they allowed us to stay, talk with our friend Ivan, and pray. It was dark and getting cold, whispers of the winter ahead. Dr. Ivan Rusyn is president of the Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary (Kyiv). He shared many painful stories from the start of the war. He lived in Bucha, which was the location of horrible atrocities in March. He never dreamed that servanthood would mean gathering dead bodies from his neighborhood. Yet in all this, he has been profoundly moved at the witness of people’s faith. People are without water and power, often for weeks, and as Ivan and his team of students and faculty show up, they say tearfully, “we knew God would save us.”
People are also asking him tough questions like where is God at this moment? How can you believe in God? Can you forgive? Those are fair questions, but we found his responses thought provoking – illustrating to us how this war has completely reshaped him.
• “It’s more interesting to live a life with good questions rather than good answers.”
• “I no longer tolerate easy answers to tough questions. Silence is the most profound answer to tough questions.”
• “I believe in the idea of forgiveness, but I cannot discuss forgiveness until it comes as a gift from God.”
• “To ask where is God in all this is not a good question. Here is the better question – what has happened to humanity that we would do such a thing?”
God is present! If our eyes are focused only on suffering and anger, which abound, then it will be difficult to see how much He is at work. Ivan taught us that when suffering is most intense, God works in different ways than we might expect – in the partnership, collaboration and compassion of the people who know God is love. People know that God is at work in Ukraine through the compassion Ivan and so many other Christians are displaying. The same has been true outside Ukraine where so many refugees live still.
At the end of the day, we stood at the border and prayed for the people of Ukraine, for those crossing with supplies and those supporting Ukrainians, and especially for Ivan. We prayed for the war to end, that God would break the bones of the enemy, and then we stood in silence. Dr. Rusyn’s faith and strength during this time has strengthened my faith. It's humbling to be a part of this “ministry of presence,” praying side-by-side with the brave and compassionate heroes supporting to the people of Ukraine. My heart has been moved.
