Hello friends. We moved into our new temporary home yesterday here in Cluj, Central Romania. Oh how the heart longs for some rhythms, and I’m hopeful they will come soon. 

As most of you know, it’s now been one month since Russia first instigated its war against the emerging, flourishing Slavic culture in  Ukraine. I haven’t watched the news, we’re among it. Our social media channels, like everyone over here, ablaze.  Grief and anger, loss and a seemingly undying optimism that in the end, evil will not, cannot win. 

I was reading the other day this famous scripture from the prophet Isaiah. He aptly expresses the cry being echoed from the hearts of all believing Ukrainians in this hour: 

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

ISaiah 64:1-2

I don’t want to be guilty of sensationalism, of making things seem even worse than they really are. Yet, I honestly don’t think that’s even possible. The things we see from friends, folks we know, and the stories we hear with our own ears, if anything, are things that you aren’t even being told. I don’t know what the media in the west is sharing, but in this update I simply want to pass on a snapshot of my stories today, from the past 24hrs, vetted, known, real, unadulterated. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to read, or engage emotionally – we’re not wired, us finite humans, to wrap our hearts around suffering beyond our capacity to help. We can barely deal with the loss of one loved one, let alone neighborhoods, villages wiped out. 

Oppressors dominating and crushing the other have taken place throughout history. There is nothing necessarily new here. What’s new is that we have a front row seat, feeling the suffering in real-time. I suppose a glimmer of hope in this mess is that real-time response, from the outpouring of aid into Ukraine, around bordering countries, and the whole world. 
Just 100 years ago, Ukraine could have been wiped from the map without many knowing, a simple footnote in some history book. Crushing belligerence is now on display for all to see, to bear witness to; as evil shakes off it’s pretend socialistic and nationalistic clothing, we now turn our attention to the antidote.. a Creator God that entered this messed up world with us, and felt it’s angry teeth to the point of death. This is what Christ did, his coming mediated not only the loving, divesting, good love of our Father God, but simultaneously mediated humanities propensity to kill what it is most afraid of. 
I struggle to sit and write an update. Each day is so full, unpredictable. Then, like tonight, when I do, it just gushes out and I’m sure nobody will ready this novel! 
Thank you for your generous support, for the new churches and friends connecting and saying “how can we help?”  – I am doing my best to circle back and correspond. I hope to update our Emergency Fund page this weekend, we are essentially ramping up to give even more AID and FUEL (for vans) in Ukraine among our network of friends, and also going deeper here in Romania with Refuge Care in simple, but super meaningful ways toward healing, story, community and employment opportunities for Ukrainians. 

The following are explanations of the photos I have selected for your. Thank you for all the prayer, and caring for not only our family but those we love and know inside and now outside of Ukraine. 

(Photo) Grandfather Kohan Mykolayovich from village called Nemyrinttsi. He donated his two pigs, slaughtered, women volunteers canned 620 tins of pork, sent to front for hungry soldiers (Vira Perozhak).
(Photo) A hospital in Zaporizhia which is receiving wounded civilians from Mariupol (Roman Sheremeta).

(Photo) Shopping complex north east Kyiv area called the Podil district. This is 7 miles from the US embassy where we would go often for documents (Aris Messinis). 

(Photo) Valerie (yellow circled face), a trusted friend, serves with Steiger Ukraine and is coordinating a network of humanitarian aid, 15 vans, from a warehouse in western Ukraine. They are also evacuating (1500 so far) and delivering tons of aid to the most hostile zones. We have begun sponsoring their team for fuel costs, and with your help we can do more. They are using $2-3k per day just in fuel. 

(Photo) At our refuge house here in Romania, our neighbors continue to bless and open their hearts to our friends. They donated a second fridge. 

(Photo) Today for lunch we met with Ukrainian Pastors Sergey and Hellen Shalukhin. They are from the now Russian occupied town in the Kherson region where they shared their story of having only 15 minutes to grab all they could and take their kids west. Hearts torn as they can’t get back in to family and friends they love. They were able to evacuate over 30 women and children here in Cluj, where we found them at a camp in the mountains last week. We are planning Saturday to bring our communities together, and explore ways forward to serve the 1000 or so Ukrainians now in this region. They explained that the Russians are trying to change currency to the ruble, and lock down communication much like they do in Russia by force – but it’s meeting harsh resistance among the civilian population in these controlled areas. 

Yesterday we received a message for help from a special needs orphanage in northern Ukraine near Belarus. They are without food, medicine, and in a very difficult situation. Thankfully, Deb engaged the message, because I wasn’t going to click on it. She was able to reach out to Belarusian friends, who connected the orphanage to believers near the border there who are now working to bring aid. Pray for Belarusian believers, they are in a very difficult situation, much like we see in Russia. Their phone and social media channels are monitored, and doing or saying anything considered pro-western will land you and your family in a world of hurt. 

In Russia, you are given 15yr prison sentences if you use the terms “war” or violate their speech laws concerning the “war” in Ukraine. Social media is shut down, if you have VPN, you can still get some, but not all access to western narratives. Schools are now forced to indoctrinate children on the “peace” that Russia is bringing to the world. Every missionary (except two!) we know in Russia has left, and even those who tried to leave ran into difficulty, seen as foreign agents.

In regions Northeast of Kyiv, we have talked to villagers in now Russian occupied territories that escaped who haven’t heard from loved ones or neighbors. They witnessed dead bodies in the streets. They hid in large metal water tanks to avoid getting hid with bullets. In some of these villages, there were Chechnyan fighters, renowned for being vicious and much worse than the Russian soldiers. They moved in after the front pushed forward, with large trucks, loaded up all the food, looted stores, houses, and essentially plundered the towns leaving nothing for the trapped civilians. The cell phones of civilians captured were confiscated, but one man hid and kept his – texting days later from Belarus where they were taken!

Gracious, time for bed.

To support aid and refugee care with us, https://mirministries.org/emergency-fund

Last night I arrived back to the city of Cluj and finally found a hotel that wasn’t booked up with refugees, or so I thought. Walking to the elevator, a little boy greeted me in Ukrainian. I smiled, only to look up and see his mother, tear filled, weary soul. She explained some of her harrowing journey from Kyiv. Suitcases and child in tote, she was literally about to collapse. In the morning, I went down to breakfast, the room was filled with Ukrainian language, our home has come to me here. I looked to the right, a man with a head wound wrapped in gauze watching clips of war from his phone while his wife ate, staring off into the distance. I usually don’t take my bible with me in public places, but I took it to breakfast this morning.

As I looked around, listening, taking in my surroundings, I thought, “God, where can you possibly be in all of this?” What can I possibly read this morning that relates to this brokenness? I reached down, opened to this Psalm, and was gently reminded of our Creator’s gentle disposition. I recalled the many ways in which I’ve seen, each day (without exaggeration) the surprising ways of God at work among the broken and oppressed.

Yesterday, Elsa and I were at our end and exhausted all our contacts trying to help some friends that we love at a particular border 8 hours away. The Coffee shop owner overheard us, and we found out they were believers, like Lighthouse Cafe! They had connections at another Coffee shop just 20 minutes from our friends. Within minutes a car was on the way to pick them up, house and feed them. When we reach our end, sometimes that is where God is waiting, ready. When the war broke out, Deb and I were driving in the US – I felt so helpless, overwhelmed, and I prayed, “God, there’s nothing I can do, I have no answers.” In that moment, I heard a whisper in my soul, “Now I can work, if you let me.” I have seen more miracles, more outrageously impossible things in this past week than in my entire life. Truly, God is for the broken.

May the mending ways of God continue to unfold. Maybe we’re supposed to embrace that helpless place of dependence more readily, without needing a war to upend our senses and security? I’m convinced our own grief over evil in this life are reflections of our Creator’s own experience. The world is not the way it should be. We are deeply loved. I’m thankful I took scripture to breakfast. I needed this more than eggs.

Our hearts are heavy with the continued uncertainty in Ukraine. We’ve postponed our return trip now twice. Our return tickets are currently planned for this next weekend. Will we return? Just myself? How can I be the most useful to the Lord? Things only look to be intensifying and I can’t imagine taking our family back until we see signs of stability.

We’ve run across several missionaries on this trip down the east coast, and receiving texts through the day from friends seeking the same sort of ‘inside scoop’ that will allow us all to get back to living.

It’s been quite disorienting for many of us who are used to planning more than a week at a time. Clark, our 16yr old said the other day something that hit home for all of us, “I just want to get back to living.” We may look and talk like Americans, but after spending 14yrs in Ukraine, we feel quite at home in Slavic culture. You’d think we’d embrace a seeming unending ‘vacation’ here, but our lives are suspended in the air, and it’s becoming more challenging by the day.

Until then, for us missionaries, it’s like we’re a bunch of airplanes unable to land, without a runway assigned. We’re each learning to trust in the Lord in the present moment, each day, in fresh ways. All the while, our hearts just want to land, be home, and do life with those we love and are investing in together.

It sounds shallow compared to those in Ukraine right now, without any options to head to safety, whatever that is. Their lives are not only on hold as well, but the immanent ‘doom’ that is the nature of fear, is very real. We can pray, we can trust the Lord knows our plight, but there’s a place of faith, of deciding what to do for our families, and ministries we are stewards of. God has made us each in His divine image, with the capacity to will to the left, or right. We listen, we ask, we knock, but we must move our faith into the realm of the material world, and trust the goodness of God that He will grant us the capacity to listen well, and move in wisdom. These decision for many are being made, I read about them, I know many of them, I feel for them deep in my heart. They are not easy, they are not all the same.

Holding patterns. This is part of the evil of war, and the threat of it. The unknown, the uncertainty. Lives upended, rhythms altered. Will we return to our known? Will we gather once again with those we love, in the living rooms we laughed and cried together in? Will we know the peaceful walks in our neighborhoods, the same sunsets? We take these questions for granted in times of stability, but when the parameters of our reality are pressed upon, out of our control, we’re forced to reckon with our faith in new ways.

We are sojourners, but if we’re honest, do any of us really want to be? Yes, our homes are eternally in the heart of God, but this present world is precious, revealing the aroma of heaven in our places of community. Those relationships, and the symbols we value together, are the closest thing we have on earth as it is in heaven. We hold out hope that we will soon be back in those blessed, imperfect spaces.

Until then, we encircle in these holding patterns, actively trusting, willing, yet uncertain.

“But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, where grafted in their place to share in the root of the Olive tree, do not boast over the branches.”

Romans 11:17

The first Christians that gathered in Rome, like all of the early Christian churches, were hybrid Jewish communities. Hybrid in the sense that fundamental Jewish ritual, and Torah keeping was synthesizing on the fly with teachings and the witness of Jesus Christ. Gentiles, representing converted Jewish and an expanding pagan believers, found themselves coming together under the belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and had established the kingdom of God through a new, expanded, and even global people.

The traditional Jews wanted to keep Sabbath (14:1-6), and saw no reason to change several ancient practices that had come to represent pillars in their faith, convictions that were deeply personal. The Gentiles however, had no such inclinations and considered every day alike. The Jews, under Torah, kept strict dietary requirements, these too became issues for the church as the Gentiles took liberty in ways that wedged and divided the new community.

If matters from within the community weren’t enough to confront, there was Rome, the powerful governing autocracy pressing upon the empire. Believers in the belly of the beast, so to speak, were in a sense representatives for the whole of this new Jewish sect around the Mediterranean world. Rome had it’s hands full these strange monotheists in cities like Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessaloniki; how the Christians behaved and represented the witness of Christ in Rome, surely Paul had in mind when writing to the believers in Rome.

In the year 2022, it’s easy to forget that we too, like the newly grafted in branch, are not the tree. We have no root of our own. This faith, this covenant with God established in Jesus Christ was, and is an ongoing grafting of the nations into the nourishing, life-giving root system of faithfulness shown to the patriarchs of the Jewish faith. God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the love and commitment shown to Israel became known to you and I through human disobedience. Paul’s reasoning in chapter 11-12 works like this:

Israel rejected Christ, and therefor God broke off the branch of the olive tree to make room for all nations (11:31). Therefore don’t be proud, or haughty in your faith, because you were already disobedient, cut off from mercy in the first place and it’s only through the rejection of Christ, both Jew and Gentile that mercy has come to each of us that believe. Then, Paul appeals to the Jewish believers in an astonishing, at least to me, turn of logic – He says the Jewish believers should also remain humble, because it’s through the Gentiles that God’s mercy is re-established in and for the branches – He’s using the Gentiles to graft them back in!

Why would God do this? Paul doesn’t pretend to know the heart and mind of God in this matter, but simply rejoices:

“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgements, and how inscrutable are His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord?”

Romans 11:33-34

Paul reminds both Jewish and Gentile believers in this new Roman faith community that all have sinned, all have been shown mercy, regardless of their claims to origin or entrance into the body of Christ.

The believers, as equals before one another, living as sacrifices for the good of one another and the world around them (Rom 12:1-2). He reminds them of their diverse nature, each having different gifts, some having prophetic witness, some teaching, giving (12:6-8) but love and honor toward one another is key to upholding their collective witness (12:9-13). He instructs them to be zealous in their faith, rejecting what is evil, to serve the Lord.

We don’t serve men ultimately, though we are to be good citizens (Romans 13:1). It’s obvious that some were not only rejecting Torah entirely, but that with God’s new kingdom on earth some believed one could completely reject the world’s governing structures as well, even forgo paying taxes etc (13:7). In Rom 13:2 Paul speaks of resisting authority. This, as greek scholars will contend, is a continuous posture of rebellion, a rejection of government institutions to the point that the government essentially must turn and sink it’s jaws of justice upon the insurrectionist. For anyone wishing to dig into Romans 13 further, see this exegesis https://learn.gcs.edu/mod/page/view.php?id=4267 –

The context of Romans 13 is surrounded by chapters that give it the proper meaning for the original readers, and our own 21st century application. It’s Christ alone, through the conscience that each person is to navigate one’s convictions. Those convictions should never divide us, we should respect the individual pursuit of worship before God as we promote what we believe to be honorable, good, and right.

We don’t serve Christ for others, but serve Christ for His glory alone.

We don’t serve worldly authority, but our attitudes and actions are revealed through our life long posture towards the structures that govern us. It’s God that has initiated the concept of government, to reject order is to bring upon yourself a world of hurt. This is the heart of what Paul was getting at. He was encouraging the uniquely diverse body of Christ to carefully ensure that when they suffer, and they did suffer, that it be against evil, and not turn in on themselves which would injure their witness.

The Roman believers were struggling under the oppression of Roman government, and also from hostile actors within Judaism who were threatened by their liberty. Paul’s instructions, guided by the Holy Spirit, were for each believer to carefully weigh what matters in their acts of worship, compelling them to embrace their diversity, and their common root of God’s mercy.

Some in the faith, are weak. Their consciences won’t allow them to stand up for or against particular things that others are willing to stand against. What moves and motivates one, may not our neighbor. Paul reminds the Roman believers, both Jew and Gentile, “Welcome those who are weak in the faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions” (14:1). Essentially, be gracious to one another, let your diverse unity display the unique fragrance of the kingdom. Where the world seeks uniformity, the church embraces true unity as a reflection that emanates from the Trinity and has become our model for relatedness in the body.

The challenge for the church in every generation is to love one. another, always, without exception, as the ultimate ‘imago Dei’ witness. We look most like God when we walk in His gift of unity.

How can we do this? How can we remain humble, and love those that we disagree with, who upset us, or refuse to align with our particular issues of conscience? One way is to heeds Paul’s letter to the Romans. By remembering we are all grafted branches, none of us ‘own’ our spiritual life, and therefor need not defend it. This gift, this love received, flows from the roots of mercy through the nourishing roots of God’s ancient covenant with Israel, renewed and perfected for all in Christ!

Don’t judge others, just don’t do it. “It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand” (Romans 14:4). In matters of conscience, the food we eat, the people we hang out with, the doctrines we espouse, these are all part of our individual journeys as we bring shape and meaning to our lives. We are to come alongside one another, bringing witness to our world that there is a Savior who loves us, unites us in our diversity, and many uncertainties. As much as it is possible with us (Romans 12:8), we remain open to unity with all people. It seems the only thing that keeps the body from this diverse unity, is a predisposition to uniformity. Thinking we must all look alike, think alike, do the Christian life alike; this was the problem in Rome, and continues to effect the body today.

Paul encouraged the believers to remember the fountain of mercy. It’s these nourishing roots that unite us in solidarity with the world as sinners, alienated and undeserving of mercy. We are grafted in, united by who we know, not what we know. This unity, if embraced and celebrated in the church, remind us that our enemy is not from within, but from without. We forgive, and show mercy, patience and endure with the many strange beliefs and actions of others, especially when they do it unto the Lord, from the conscience as their act of service or worship to God. In the end, it will be God that weighs each of our hearts, whom he knows perfectly.

“If we life , we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.” Romans 14:7.