From January 30 to February 6, 2023, our mission worker Mykola Nikitin and a group of brothers from the Community of the Good Shepherd church in Rivne went on a trip to the east of Ukraine to visit our sister churches and provide assistance to people affected by the war.
Most of their time, they spent in the church of our Association House of Agape in the city of Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk region where Serhii Timofeev is the pastor. It is a relatively small community, but every month they host more than 500 refugees from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson regions. Four days a week, they prepare 40 food packages and take people in their community: they try to make friends with them, talk over tea, pray, and share with them about Christ. This is how 3 groups of 12–15 people are held during the day. So, they have been serving for 8 months (they had a break for only 2 weeks). A total of 120–150 people each week. They try to talk with people, they help them, and they try to identify with their suffering. It’s not just about giving out a person a package of food, but you listen to everyone – it’s about hearing people’s pain that they’ve been through. After all, they are all deeply wounded and need God’s comfort. The Church, like nothing else on earth, is His hands for comforting their tortured souls.
One woman from Kharkiv said that the war made her stop and think about God. Her name is Galina. Her son died in a car accident, and she keeps asking why it happened and whether it was God’s will or the devil’s will.
A married couple, a man and a woman, worked at the Donetsk airport and had three apartments. They were well-off and financially secure for their old age, but in one moment they lost everything. And now they have to rent a small apartment in another city for a lot of money.
The man was a bus driver at the company. He was behind the wheel when the bus was directly hit by a shell. 19 people died, but he survived…
ur brothers also visited the front-line city of Nikopol and the village of Chervonogrihorivka. People in these places are especially in need of help because of the daily shelling and threat. We pray for them and, if possible, try to visit them in this difficult time. There is the church from our Association The Way to Salvation in the city of Nikopol. Pastor Yurii Yakovych Sverdlov said that every day their town is shelled on schedule: at midnight, in the morning, then at 3:00 p.m. They fire at them across the body of water all the time because Energodar is 4 km away from them. People from the church were very surprised and happy to see us. They conveyed greetings to everyone. By the way, our community was once involved in the planting of this church.
In Chervonogrihorivtsia, a few kilometers away from Nikopol lives a family of our friends who temporarily stayed in Zalissya – Dasha, Alyona, and her husband Dima. We had an opportunity to pray together as we visited them, and they welcomed us warmly – they were very happy to see us.
One of the places where brothers and I performed a special prayer was in the city of Dnipro at the site of the tragedy that happened three weeks ago. A deadly rocket hit the residential building, destroying two entrances where civilians lived. We couldn’t help but cry at the scene – you can’t just go away and not be touched by what you see there. We prayed for those who survived and who lost their homes. We were able to provide help for some of them and pray with them.
On the way back home, we stopped at a church in Irpin. We were welcomed there as close relatives. When we approached the church, women who participated in the evacuation in March 2022 began to gather around us. When the war began, they all came to the church for help. And through the evacuation and what happened to them, God touched them, and then when they returned to their home, they came to this church. And many of them were already baptized or are preparing for baptism. Our drivers remembered very well their eyes and faces in the days when they were evacuating them – at that moment they were all petrified and had stone-cold faces, but now their eyes are glowing and they are all lit up – it is noticeable and it gets us pumped up as well.
On this trip, we had a lot of meetings and communication with different people. One thing we clearly understood for ourselves was, “God has given a special time for all of us so that we could preach the gospel. People need Christ now more than ever, and we were glad to be able to bring His comfort to many of them…”
Mykola Nikitin
