The war you stopped counting

One · What happened

One night, both capitals

The strike on Hlevakha came on the evening of the 19th, a Saturday. The head of the Kyiv regional military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, announced the deaths, and prosecutors opened a war crimes case. Reuters reported three children and a woman killed across the Kyiv region that night. The third child was a girl who died in hospital after a separate strike.

Before morning, the Associated Press reported, Ukraine had launched more than a thousand drones at Russia. Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, called it the largest attack ever on the capital and said four hundred fifty drones headed for the city were shot down. The Moscow region's governor said two people were killed, a seventy-four-year-old man and a forty-four-year-old woman, and twenty were wounded.

Who started it, who is right, and how it ought to end are questions most readers settled for themselves a long time ago, one way or the other. I am not going to reopen any of them. This is about what those two paragraphs did to you, or failed to do.

Two · What it is doing

Tired of it, or glad about half of it

In early 2022 a lot of Christians in this country prayed for Ukraine every Sunday. Some churches still do. Most of us quit somewhere in the second year. Nobody decided to. The war kept going and our attention did not. Now a house full of toddlers gets hit and it slides past like a traffic report. That is fatigue, and it is very human. It is also a small hardening you can feel if you are honest.

Then there is the reader who has not stopped reading. He follows the war closely, maybe every day, and he has a side. When he read about Hlevakha he was angry. When he read about Moscow he felt something harder to admit, a small satisfaction, a sense that they had it coming. Readers who favor the other side felt the same pair of things with the names switched. The dead on the far side become a score. He would never say a seventy-four-year-old man deserved to die. For about a second he felt it, though, and I want to talk about that second.

Three · Where the ground is

Rachel refusing to be comforted

Jeremiah 31:15 has a voice heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. Matthew quotes it in chapter 2, after soldiers kill the little boys of Bethlehem. Scripture lets a mother refuse comfort, and nobody in the passage hurries her. When the text reaches the worst thing a war does, the killing of small children in their own homes, it stops and lets her cry, with no explanation attached.

A few minutes of actually stopping, the way the text does, is the first thing a Christian owes the house in Hlevakha. The analysis can wait. Two three-year-olds were asleep in a house on Saturday night, or playing, or being put down by a mother who had done it a thousand times. God knows which. Stop long enough to be sad about it.

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls

Proverbs 24:17 says, Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles. It is aimed straight at the small satisfaction. Your view of the war can stay where it is. Solomon wants to know what your heart does when the other side bleeds. The man near Moscow was seventy-four. He did not order anything. He was somebody's father, and quite possibly somebody's grandfather, and the Lord who made him sees his death no differently than He sees the woman's in Hlevakha.

Jesus goes further in Matthew 5:44 and tells His followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. Most American Christians do not have an enemy in this war, just a side, so it ought to be easier for us than for anybody to pray for everyone who died on Saturday night in both countries, by the little we know of them.

Weary of it

Galatians 6:9 tells believers not to grow weary of doing good, because in due season they will reap if they do not give up. Paul is writing about ordinary faithfulness to other people, sowing to the Spirit, and prayer for suffering strangers falls well inside that. The weariness is real. More coverage will only make it worse. Pick one thing you can keep doing, small enough to last, and keep doing it until the war is over.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Nobody asked your opinion about this war and nobody will. Your prayers and your church still count for something.

1. 01

   Pray for what is left of the family in Hlevakha.

   The father, the grandparents, whoever is left in that house. Say Hlevakha in your prayer so it stays a real place to you.

2. 02

   Now the two who died near Moscow.

   Pray for them too, and mean it. If that sticks in your throat, pray anyway and tell the Lord it sticks. Proverbs 24:17 has you in mind.

3. 03

   Pick one small thing and put it on the calendar until the war ends.

   A monthly gift toward refugee aid in Ukraine, or one minute of prayer for Ukraine and Russia every Sunday after lunch. Small enough that you will actually keep doing it in year five.

4. 04

   Ask your pastor whether the church is still praying about this war in the service.

   If it dropped off, ask kindly whether it could come back for a minute on Sunday mornings. A congregation praying together is how a lot of believers keep from getting hard.

5. 05

   Find the Ukrainian or Russian believers near you.

   Many cities have a Slavic congregation. Some have one of each. Go visit on a Sunday, sit in the back, and afterward ask somebody how their family is. Then read the next headline.