In early October, Heidi and I went to Zhitomir, Ukraine with a group of Christians from three Charleston Area churches. The experience was life changing. I simply don’t have the words to describe the dichotomy of what we saw there-- hope and hopelessness. Love and emptiness. Unthinkable oppression, set to the sounds of children laughing. High heels on dirt roads. The smells of apple orchards and sweat-soaked wool. Blue skies and ground-in dirt that never comes out. A national toughness forged by Soviet cruelty.
It is a place so far from you and me that it is not of our world.
When we went there, I thought I was going on an adventure of sorts-- an adventure that would allow me the opportunity to deliver food to the poor, and see their eyes shine with gratitude, awash with their love for God. In a Ukrainian village, however, smiles and shining eyes and off-the-cuff love are in short supply. What’s plentiful is despair, and ill-fitting clothes, and smells of oppression and hopelessness… the kind of smells that cause the American palette to short circuit.
What I wish I could tell you about are clean little cottages and Babushkas chatting over picket fences and hearty men working fields, but these things were rare in the world I saw. It was yards filled with scraps of someday junk, and broken old ladies walking on crutches, and men with eyes that spoke of bone-deep exhaustion. It was beautiful children with dirty faces dressed in rags. It was windows that never opened, and doors that didn’t work, and a winter approaching that brings with it temperatures of 40 below.
Who are these people? How do they survive? Why would they want to? For many, only Vodka soothes their destruction. When a man’s dignity and ambition is ground into dust and put on the dinner table as his best efforts, alcohol is a seductive and promising lover. Hangovers? So what-- when a good day is brutal, pain becomes relative. Alcohol problems aren’t even hidden; men nod along casually in front of their wives when confronted with their addictions. It’s hard to care when caring hurts.
Life in a Ukrainian city, however, is no story of leisure either. Think Bronx, not Manhattan. Here the skylines are still dominated by Soviet-built apartments-- shoddy high-rises constructed in months by workmen ordered to waive quality and safety for the façade of efficiency… an obscene gesture to the West that “the people” could build western luxury in one-tenth the time. The result is scarred and gray and leaking, with surrounding alleys of pocked concrete and open spaces of litter-strewn weeds. Small businesses struggle to emerge, stifled by the lack of capitol needed to bribe corrupt officials-- and more importantly to pay protection to a mafia so brutal they are spoken of in hushed tones.
Ukraine redefines the American myth of mean streets, where live and let die seems to be an ethos, not a pithy t-shirt slogan. The proudest, toughest New Yorker wouldn’t last a month in a Ukrainian city-- the winds of misfortune on the nicest of days would sweep them into the gutter.
Ukraine is not, however, all misery. There is, indeed, a light atop this national mountain of despair, and I won’t mince words where it comes from: Ukrainian Christians.
In the villages, they were as easily identifiable as eagles among seagulls-- their eyes did shine when they discovered fellow Christians had come calling. Their ranks included all demographics, from the ancient babushkas in their bright-colored scarves, to young men and their wives who’ve turned away from despair and towards the Light. They couldn’t wait to tell us of their faith, and their belief in the promises of the Christ. They were excited not just about our gifts of food, but that we might evangelize to their neighbors. They were the salt of the earth, and I found myself lifted by their faith.
Faced with similar circumstances, I wondered if I would have the strength to believe, and hope. I pray that I would, but I thank God I’ll never know. I fear I have more in common with the defeated, where sane despair rules their world. Thankfully, the village Christians we met were hard at work, and have great plans to share the news of Christ, and His promise of better times than these. Today, they are few, but God loves to help people who are committed to doing His work. Filled with God’s spirit, I’m certain these Christians will transform first their villages, and later their nation.
The team we worked with also stands in utter opposition to the world of despair I spoke of earlier. They are the best that we Christians can hope to be-- all educated, all working three jobs, all forsaking the siren call of the West to serve God and their people in word and deed.
One of our translators broke off an engagement to a European-- and a green card west-- because she heard in her prayers that he wasn’t the man God had in mind for her.
One translator willingly gives up her salary as a CPA for weeks at a time so she can serve God with her voice, a gift she says He gave her.
The Pastor we worked with serves a large church, and plants village churches, and runs a Bible Institute, and seeks opportunities to play music at weddings for the evangelistic opportunity of singing songs about Jesus. Time and again, just chatting with their team, I was overwhelmed by their faith in the Lord. In the lives of this Ukrainian team I have seen real Christian values… I have seen real work… I have seen real agape love. And I am humbled.
My life is now changed. Never again will I spend $2,500 without thinking that our Ukrainian team bought a village home and planted a church for that sum.
Never again will I be able to buy a pair of shoes without thinking that I spent more than a middle-class Ukrainian makes in a month.
And never again will I kid myself that I’m anything but swaddled in luxury. That’s because, just for a second, I got to see the world through the lens Jesus gives us… and that’s not something one easily forgets.
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