Where we serve, the war rolls on. It may have disappeared from the UK news, but along the line of ‘contact’ ceasefire violations continue daily and lives continue to be devastated among the millions affected by this war.
During these 3+ years of war, we have seen Christians here sharing the gospel with a winsome compassion that values every person, without judging or condemning, showing grace that exemplifies how God has treated us. By daily prayer and through costly acts of selfless caring, they show the world around that every life matters to God, however broken or insignificant they may seem.
I love and I hate statistics. Numbers can tell us the size of a problem, but not the size of the tragedy when an eternal soul is lost. Statistics on how many people have died in this war seem to have stalled on ‘more than 10,000.’ Not that people aren’t still dying, but it’s like someone decided to stop counting, as what are a few more limbs or lives lost, when 10,000+ are already dead?
Please pray for the people of this traumatised country
But every life matters to God. When only 1 soldier or child dies in a day, this is not an ‘acceptable loss.’ When we drive down to the region near the war zone, on our side of the road we pass tanks and military supply vehicles and troop deployment trucks heading to the war. Yet on the 3-hour journey, most of what we see coming the other way are ambulances with their lights flashing – carrying the wounded, the maimed, the dying to the hospitals in our city. It’s a sobering, distressing picture. And every life matters to God. So Christians visit every bed in these hospitals every week, to share Jesus with those with no hope besides.
It’s heart-breaking to see photos of new graves in the ‘Rebel zone’, without even a name. These are not ‘unmarked graves’ of the anonymous, rather they simply mark them as ‘fighter #2120’. In this ‘hybrid war’ of deception, foreign soldiers are allegedly not present, and local ‘separatists’ don’t want to reveal their identities for fear of recriminations. So even their graves don’t record their names – they are hidden from the world. Yet they have grieving mothers too, and wives and children. Every life matters to God, on whichever side of the contact line they stand, or fight, or die. And most of these young men are dying without Jesus, without forgiveness, without hope.
One Christian couple here, friends of ours and both orphans themselves, have taken a number of orphan boys into their home, which they call the ‘House of Grace’. Some of these boys have special needs, no official documents or identity. One of them escaped the war zone, sat on the barrel of a retreating tank, arriving with nothing and no-one. But now, he is loved and accepted by those who care for him simply because God has cared for them. Because every life matters to God.
This family speak about Jesus in every conversation; they reach out every week into local orphanages and to single teenage mothers with babies, as even these forgotten young lives matter to God.
Please pray for the people of this traumatised country. Pray for Christians who are reaching out to both sides with the Gospel in a time of war. Pray that we will never ever forget, that every life matters to God, whoever they are and whatever they have done.
Then pray that YOU will never forget it either and live this next week in the light of that transforming reality. Jesus came to die because my life matters to God, because every life matters to God. We must reach out to others for the same reason.