Without taking his eyes off the road Erik solves one of the world’s most frustrating puzzles in 27 seconds while traveling 60 kph across Ukraine’s icy asphalt veins. I’ve lost count how many times he’s solved it during this frigid, weeklong trek through frontline towns delivering humanitarian aid and Christmas blessings. The Rubik’s cube was a welcome friend in Erik’s younger years as he sought new and clever ways to pass the hours, days, weeks, months, years in the orphanage—like the kids do now in the bomb shelters.

It's these normalcies I find most striking given every day’s backdrop of body counts, drone strikes, and creeping front lines. Puzzles still entertain while babies still need feeding, and students keep studying in preparation for an utterly unpredictable future. Parents do their best to keep it all together, hoping within a harrowing reality. Even taking time to play with their kids seems somewhat heroic to me as war wages on well beyond their control.

That’s why we came. My husband, David, met Pastors Rudy Balazhinec and Vadym Khlobas in Washington, DC in January 2023, nearly a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion began. They’d come to meet with leaders on Capitol Hill and found themselves at a multi-night event at National Community Church where David was a pastor and led the church’s global partnership strategy for many years. Rudy implored us, “Come. Spend time with people.”

So we did. On Thanksgiving Day 2023, Rudy stood waiting for us outside the airport in Budapest carrying two bags of McDonald’s chicken nuggets. “Closest thing to turkey,” he laughed. The Hungarian countryside rolled past for hours until cargo trucks, strung together like beads on a bracelet, began to line the roadsides—that’s how we knew we were close. Truck drivers wait for days—sometimes weeks—to pass through the checkpoints. With far less trouble we pass through and soon arrive at Uzhhorod—a small city in the westernmost province of Ukraine, nestled at the base of the Carpathian Mountains, protected from Russia’s rocket launchers—our home until the New Year.

We spent most of the following days and weeks at the warehouse, where dozens of volunteers logged hundreds of hours stuffing and wrapping Christmas presents in preparation for distribution to children at local orphanages, seniors in nursing homes, wounded soldiers at military hospitals, and eventually, to people hunkered down in frontline towns. The boxes were stuffed full of practical items (toiletries, first aid kits, socks, handwarmers) and uplifting treats (cookies, coffee, cocoa), customized for adults and children. Every third day or so we’d help deliver the gifts—opening untold numbers of cracker packages and testing the bounce in all the bouncy balls. “Dobre dain, shchos’ dla vas,” we’d say, handing each person a box or backpack filled with all the love and hope and encouragement we could give, knowing it wasn’t hardly enough. 

Visiting orphaned children with severe disabilities, I was glad to place the box in their hands or lap or bed and be able to say, “Someone made this for you.” The chocolate was quickly gobbled, followed by tantrums of excitement. It was a devastating delight. Each one, including caretakers, doing their best to live. This, a small gift and enormous joy. 

Evenings were family time for the most part, spent together with the volunteers and their kids. We laugh-cried through multilingual-multicultural charades and listened intently to their stories of displacement, fear, anger, struggle, betrayal, loss, and resistance. And when Rudy asked us to join a small team for a six-day trip to frontline cities and towns, we went. 

What follows are brief reflections from each major stop, trimming anything travelogue-esque—like the innumerable gas station hot dogs and double Americanos consumed. What I hope you find through these vignettes is something more substantial about steadfastness: This multi-year assault has not robbed Ukrainians of their kindness or their giving. If anything, it has strengthened both. 

Note to reader: You can listen to the song in English or Ukrainian and buy stuffed animals from Mama Sing My Song.

Seated strategically against some wind-breaker bushes and focused intently on not shiver-spilling my coffee, I warm watching a man cross the rain slickened cobblestone with a small Christmas tree bound and laid across his arms. What joy awaits him wherever he’s going. My mind’s eye flashes, and I recall a different man I’d seen earlier carrying a similar-sized bundle in the same position, a stiff and lifeless child wrapped in a white sheet. It’s a paralyzing blend of realities—no one exempt from the tensions.

Here, holiday cheer feels an act of resistance, with lights strung through the city streets despite certain blackouts. 2023 was the first year since 1917 that Ukraine officially celebrated Christmas on December 25th rather than continuing to follow the Russian Orthodox Church’s calendar. It has all the awkwardness of practicing a new tradition in the throes of tired conflict, yet the shift itself says something of hope.

Familiar Christmas tunes sung in low octaves scratch through the loudspeakers, sounding more like somber prayers than cheery jingles. Everything shiny—whether timber or tidings—is a pang of remembrance of those in the trenches or no longer with us. The children’s delight ripping through wrapping is the only thing unchanged. “Three presents?! Wow, you must really love us,” she says, an incredulous, bug-eyed six-year-old with braided pigtails.

The vans are filled to nearly overflowing and readied for the long road ahead. Scraping ice off the windshield and squinting through clear streaks, David and I arrive at the warehouse before dawn, stacking our small bags atop helmets and bulletproof vests. No words are spoken until an hour outside Uzhhorod when Rudy cracks a joke on the walkie-talkie. And so it begins, with 14,300 km stretching ahead of us toward God knows what.

An eerie quiet settles in the streets as curfew nears. Even the trees seem to hold their breath as darkness thickens and the cold cements. We walk in bracing silence. Who knows what wreckage might fall from the sky tonight.

It’s our host Dima’s 43rd birthday and his wish is to walk us through the capital sites. We begin near St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery where relics of war sit rusting on its plaza—tanks, cars, trucks, charred and shattered. The iconic white marble likeness of Princess Olga stands nearby, partially buried in sandbags and wearing a bulletproof vest.

A blue and bullet-ridden train car seizes my imagination. For a moment I can all but hear the cries of the mothers huddled inside, shielding their children from the machine gun spray ripping through the walls. Standing here I can hope only that God hears, sees, and is moved to mercy. Through the holes I see the pearly gates depicted on the far wall across the plaza, the corner mural which begins the Wall of Remembrance. This wall, with the faces of fallen soldiers collaged in tribute, stretches a full city block. So much life extinguished. Senselessly.

A cold mist enfolds us as we make our way through the park and across an iconic pedestrian bridge, walking on windows as highway traffic passes underneath. We pass through the Arch of Freedom, a 40-year-old monument symbolizing friendship with Russia. In May 2022, three months after the full-scale invasion, the monument was renamed and dedicated to the Ukrainian people. Besides a large scissure spray painted at the crest, the arch is still standing.

We three vans pull into an apartment complex—a towering bleak blend of colors muted and muddy. It’s dense and dark except for dots of bright scarves marking a cluster of people bundled in black and beige standing somberly in the parking lot. As the group shuffles toward our van, I realize it’s us they’re waiting for, or rather the gifts we’re bringing—the promise of Christmas.

I step out of the van into the silence. One by one they warm as I smile and greet them with my very few Ukrainian words, spoken with what I’m sure by their smirks is a toddler’s pronunciation, if even that. I’m quickly grateful for the woman in the red coat with matching lipstick and a shock of blonde hair, kindly and clearly in charge. “Girl, 7 – 10. Boy, 5 – 7,” she reads aloud from the gift box labels as I turn them toward her in otherwise utter helplessness.

A photo is called for and I’m pulled to the middle of the group, a girl with disabilities pushed next to me—we hold hands. She beams with joy, my fast friend. I hand a gift to a woman in grey, though she seemed more interested in eye-contact than the heavy box I was handing her. I felt for a long moment she was studying, searching a visitor’s hope. Though self-conscious of my light-heartedness, I wondered if it too was a gift to give, seeing as how they had ache enough.

Soon we’re stepping through the wreckage of apartments and schools—“military targets”—ripped through and bombed out. A blackboard hangs on hardly, all the desks incinerated. Shreds of the morning’s lesson litter the ground, crushed together with window shards and roof remnants. There is no longer any trace of a second floor except stairs and slivers of alphabet still plastered high overhead. Where once the singsong of schoolkids filled the halls, silence smolders.

Who knows what wisp of inspiration on which breathless day led the artist back to the apartment complex reduced to rubble. A single spray-painted candle burns bright above a former entryway. Purple and white flowers on growing vines sprawl from windows once witness to a working family’s morning coffee, family dinners, and Christmas mornings. Their shoes, of all things, are still by the door, though photo frames have fallen mercilessly, their contents burned within. The kitchen now dangles three stories high, cupboards flailing in wind and rain. A bomb bit through entire columns of adjoining apartments, chomping them from this lifetime with all the life they carried. Gone. In a moment, in a flash, in a deafening blast. “Ashes, ashes…”

Emotions are hard to summon or sort, standing here amidst desecrated life. A sense of travesty swells to be sure, and empathy of tidal proportions, yet it’s not tears or rage that vie within… I feel harrowed, helpless. My spirit chilled by the whispered taunting chant of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities… all is vanity… striving after the wind.”

Outside a man walks his dog. It’s the leash that strikes me—where would it run? Meanwhile, a sanitation worker in a neon vest shuffles slowly between demolished buildings, picking up litter from what’s left of the walkways. Daily ritual, best we can.

Slava, a chaplain in Kharkiv’s voluntary defense unit, proudly recounts the first weeks of war when the city’s citizens defied the mayor’s nonchalance and repelled Russian attacks for weeks until Ukraine’s military could arrive. “It might as well be Russia,” says Putin. Clearly not.

“Here we sleep,” says Slava, opening the door to a giant room full of cots on the second floor of one of the city’s most historic churches. Hundreds of families now live in the basement, all their earthly belongings stuffed below beds—doors freed from their hinges and laid atop cement blocks—with sheets and blankets hung between for a modicum of privacy. It’s the safest place, by far. “Here the Bishop even slept for all the past year,” says Slava, revealing a space big enough for one body, lying below the church’s holiday costume collection hanging from the ceiling.

Hours into the dead of night, a blast lands a few blocks away. The force shudders through body and building, the stained-glass straining to shake free. We brace, bleary-eyed, waiting for another… nothing.

We are back in the vans well before daybreak, aware this next stretch is 12 hours of driving even in good years when the roads weren’t quite so much like the surface of the moon.

In a rural area of desecrated farmland now laced with mines, I notice a blanket draped over the corner of the house doing the job of a roof. Vehicles lie mangled in the yard like used floss. Everything rusting, charred, snapped. A little yellow Lada riddled with bullet holes the size of golf balls haunts the streetscape. “Life just broke,” they say. A couple surviving souls are still hunkered down in their homes. Here, please, a box of food for you. Supplies to last a couple weeks. Tears roll down the cheeks of a tender mother—she won’t leave her son. He died in the war and is buried in the backyard. Where would I go?

A neighbor shows us his collection of bullet casings and bomb shards, and another brings out a baby bunny, gently holding the quivering, shock of white fluff with both hands while a cigarette dangles from his lips. Look how innocent, the deep lines around his eyes seem to say. Don’t be scared.

Around the corner, down a treacherous dirt road, we spot a tank—abandoned with an unexploded rocket nose down in the dirt beside it. As my fingers trace the muddy steel tread, I feel its magnitude of destructive intent course through my body like voltage. My jaw clenches like a vice as my heart indexes all the human effort and coordination that went into this death tool—here—and everyone dead or driven out.

A line of jugs and empty bottles forms outside the church as the handpump turns on and water collection begins. It’s darker here, more desperate.

Pray, if you do, for the pastor who lost three sons to the war—two shot dead less than a mile from the church while being made to dig their own graves.

We are, at this point, the furthest east and south we’ll go—less than 20 km from the front line. The tiny town has turned off all streetlights to avoid detection by the drones buzzing like a swarm overhead. Gatherings of more than two cars tend to become targets, we’re told by the soldiers who’ve just rolled up in their tank after finishing a shift. “Best to keep moving,” they say, the dull glow of their cigarettes the only discernible light. But our tire’s gone flat, and the lug nuts give no hint of loosening.

Working quickly, quietly, we unload an entire van of gifts here for the children in all the nearby towns. We spend money on sweets we don’t need in the town’s only shop, and by some miraculous creativity Erik and Nikita manage to pound the bent hubcap back into shape and fill the flat tire with enough air to make it to a next, safer stop. We hope.

A now iconic nine-story administrative building blasted through its middle casts its shadow over “Trophy Row,” a scenic central plaza filled with Russian tanks hard won. Standing here, a simple question sends a rare tear rolling down the cheek of our new local friend, a mine technician, as he says only, “It’s been very hard.” I wonder if he's remembering the bulldozers scraping through debris in desperate search for bodies, friends, still buried.

At a nearby restaurant-turned-safehouse for displaced people, the mine technician and his wife share about life-and-death days and their hopes for their kids while ordering us borscht and shots of local vodka. In Mykolaiv, Russian forces ransacked homes and terrorized residents. The city had no electricity, no water, no food. Pension recipients received no payments, and no one was allowed in or out. Help could not arrive, nor could it be sought. “All the people suffered, but somehow we survived,” they say.

After chasing the long horizon of open farmland, billowing smoke and fire emerge suddenly. We're nearing the city. A heavy hush pins us down. No fear. Just deep silence. We are driving into hell. “A bomb blew up that building two days ago…” says Rudy, pointing to smoldering rubble 10 yards away.

The iconic sign marking the city limit of Kherson cues us to pull on bulletproof vests and strap on helmets. Less than a mile from the church we’re visiting—on the other side of the Dnipro River—Russian snipers lie in wait while the armies trade rockets, missiles, and general shelling. “When I hear the sound of bombs, I know I am home,” says Pastor Yuriy.

Pastor Yuriy has remained all this time, “living at the gates of hell,” as David put it. He bakes 1,000 loaves of bread each week for his congregation and the people of the city. With the slightest glance he signals when to press against a wall or seek cover, yet remains purehearted enough to greet the children with a smile, deliver a weekly sermon, and serve communion.

David asks Pastor Yuriy what scripture he returns to over and over. “The story of Hagar. Alone and rejected, she is reminded of the God who sees. This for me is everything,” he says. “Sometimes I cry in the morning and ask God, How long? I don’t have the strength. I can’t take it any longer… but I find my laments are a healing agent for my broken heart.”

How to hold all this together, alongside cheer, with holidays nearing once again? As the days grow darker with winter’s turn, many traditions—like Advent—make space to communally lament fear, loss, despair, and begin rituals of waiting, watching—for hope, for blessing, for a light in the world, for a word. Within the Christian-Christmas context, the four weeks before the birth of Jesus are about waiting and anticipation. It’s a pensive, seeking, hallowed time. Or can be. 

In whatever way suits you, I entreat you to pray for all the faithful who are giving of themselves to care for the lonely across the world—including all those who find themselves on the frontlines of violence and suffering. May we remember and encourage them. For that, I offer a simple liturgy for the weeks ahead—celebrating steadfastness in the face of every evil and lessening force.

Opening Prayer

Leader: Almighty God, who hears the cries of the distressed and sees the suffering of the world, we gather in your presence to seek comfort and strength.

All: In the hush of Advent, we open our hearts to the pain of others, praying for peace and redemption.

Call to Reflection

Leader: As we light each candle this Advent or string lights in our homes, let it serve as a beacon of hope for those in Ukraine and beyond. In their endurance, we find inspiration; in their grief, we extend our compassion.

All: May the light of these candles illuminate our paths with justice and mercy.

A Time for Silent Prayer

Leader: In silence, we hold in our hearts the stories of those affected by upheaval and loss, offering our empathy as a prayerful response.

All: [Moment of silence]

Responsive Prayer

Leader: For the mothers and fathers who strive to protect their families.

All: Lord, grant them courage and strength.

Leader: For the children who dream of futures free from fear.

All: Lord, bless them with safety and hope.

Song

"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" by Josh Garrels

“Christmas Hymn” by Jon Guerra

Benediction

Leader: As we go forth in our Advent journey, may we carry the lessons of resilience and the promise of God's presence into a world yearning for healing and restoration.

All: Amen. May our prayers manifest as acts of love and justice.