CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: 'God just put something in my heart for Ukraine, a love for that country and its children'
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“God just put something in my heart for Ukraine, a love for that country and its children.”
I was talking to my Inverness friend Simeon Ewing, who spent almost 10 years working with children and young people in Ukraine from 2006-2015, WRITES JOHN DEMPSTER.
As he told me about his reaction to the Russian invasion, this love was evident in the tenderness with which he spoke about the country and its people. He knows so many Ukrainians and folk working in the country as Christian missionaries, and is following their stories on Facebook and email, suffering with them, sharing their revulsion at Vladimir Putin’s words and actions, praying for them, for peace and justice, entrusting them to God.
His friends in the country had been “preparing for the worst,” he told me, but “what has unfolded has been worse than the worst people expected”.
Because this war is closer to us, and throws into question the future of European security, it is more personally threatening than other conflicts and oppressive regimes around the world. As we watch the people of Ukraine and face the reality of their suffering our hearts are softened to suffering everywhere – so much suffering in a broken world – and we weep with those who weep, and hold them in the light of God’s love.
The disturbing thing is that Putin’s greatest motive, more profound than securing Russia’s borders or extending its territory, is to restore the old Russia, ruled from the city of Kyiv in the years following the conversion of St Vladimir the Great to Christianity in 988AD.
It was a Holy Rus, in which Orthodox Church and civic authorities worked hand in hand. Rus was the Chosen Nation, its land somehow sacred.
In other words, religion – or a political misappropriation of religion – lies at the heart of Putin’s policy: a stark warning of the danger of a love-less religion.
But the God who prompted Simeon and his Polish wife Joanna’s love for Ukraine brings comfort to all in Ukraine who are open to divine love.
Simeon’s contacts speak of having a sense of God’s presence with them in the trauma. In a video, a Ukrainian family sings together of God in their kitchen – “He will keep me strong”.
There’s film of Ukrainian people gathering in the streets to pray, and drawing particular strength from Psalm 31: “Praise be to the Lord, for he showed me the wonders of his love when I was in a city under siege.”
If Simeon cares for Ukraine, and feels revulsion at Putin’s words and actions, how much more does God abhor the diktats from the Kremlin, how much more is God present in compassion, power and love with suffering Ukrainians.
