CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: John Dempster describes how the spirit of hope and love can persist even in the darkest of times, as shown by experiences of war and strife in Ukraine
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
“God, there’s nothing I can do. I’ve no answers,” prayed Bruce Crowe. And it seemed that God responded: “Now I can work if you’ll let me.”
Bruce’s post was shared on Facebook by my friends Simeon and Joanna Ewing – they met him in Ukraine when working there 2008-2015. The Ewings are devastated by what’s been happening in the country.
They – like Bruce, who is now based in Romania working with Ukrainian refugees – are spending many hours each week in Inverness, contacting people in Ukraine and around the world, coordinating aid and arranging accommodation for refugees, and sharing requests for prayer.
Perhaps sometimes, facing darkness and wanting to help, we feel like Bruce – “There’s nothing I can do.”
But as he says: “When we reach our end, sometimes that is where God is waiting, ready.”
Our partnering with God is important – our reliance on God, our sense of expecting the unexpected. The great Spirit of Love is on the move in even the darkest of places.
This Great Love is seen in Simeon’s sense of the Church as one body of people, one family. People in Inverness are referring to Ukrainian Christians as “brothers and sisters”. People in Ukraine are living self-sacrificially, wanting to help each other, even though they themselves are in danger.
The Great Love is seen in the peace that some Ukrainian Christians are reporting even when in very fraught circumstances. Joanna tells me about Yulia, displaced to west Ukraine, apart from her husband and her mum.
Joanna finds it “so amazing, how much peace and calm Yulia knows in her heart”. The source of this peace amidst tears is the God to whom Yulia sings praises in voice messages left on Joanna’s phone.
The Great Love is seen in the consequences of prayer. There are lots of examples, Simeon tells me, “of God’s protection and God’s miraculous provision”. Bruce Crowe wrote on March 9: “I have seen more miracles, more outrageously impossible things in the past week than in my entire life.”
And Simeon says: “People feel strengthened by the knowledge that people around the world are praying for them specifically by name.” Joanna sees prayer as a weapon of love in the battle against darkness. In the midst of horrendous things, this Great Love is always active. Simeon and Joanna’s elder daughter, who’s 12, spent her earliest years in Ukraine. She wants to be an architect, and now says poignantly: “I wish I was older so that I could help rebuild Ukraine.”
A greater architect is already dreaming dreams above the ruined thoroughfares and devastated lives of Ukraine. As Bruce Crowe puts it: “May the mending ways of God continue to unfold.”
