Prayers for Peace

Dear Friends,
I have been thinking, as you have, a lot about the situation in and the people of Ukraine.  I suspect I should be praying more and thinking less.  It is natural for us to want to understand, to understand and respond in healing and life-giving ways.  How easily we feel empathy and concern for people living in a place which wasn’t on our radar until recently.  I suspect this comes when we sense our common humanity.  “How would I feel if that were happening to me?”

My opinion of the man who has caused all this, who wants to be Tsar, could not be lower.  Really.  I am also aware that human anger almost never works the righteousness of God.  I am aware of the danger of nurturing hate.  That it is far too easy to start hating and exceedingly difficult to stop.  I am twisted in knots.  Soldiers sent to the front whose families back in Russia, by all accounts, don’t even know where they are wind up being pawns in a brutal power play.  Russians who live outside Russia will be in danger of being harmed as scapegoats when they have no culpability and may have even been exiled for disagreeing with those who have shocked the world.

What is the way of love in the face of the tragedy of war?  This is the question before us as we find ourselves addicted to news about what is happening.  I have no simple answers.  Yet, I am convinced this is the question we need to be asking as we feel sorrow and loss for the people of Ukraine and all in the path of violence and death in these days.

Pastor Mike