First Love’s team member, Rosa, has been in Ukraine since before Russia’s invasion and recently shared about her experience.
”God has never stopped working in the hearts and lives of the people here! Despite the amazing work that I have been able to be a part of, life here in Ukraine continues to be challenging. The realities of war bring a lot of sorrow, physical destruction, emotional and mental stress as well as constant pivoting in ministry. The people that I minister to and with are in a constant state of change. This has made life very unstable for most people including myself.
Asking me what my plans are for a couple of months from now seems like an impossible question to consider when I’m not even sure that our lives won’t be drastically altered all over again by the end of this week.
When the full-scale war started over two years ago, all four of the families I’d spent the past 18 years serving alongside in our ministry to orphans and foster-children were suddenly gone. With only my director of operations, S*, still here we looked for new ways in which we could impact our community for Christ.
I’m so thankful to God for the group of believers that He raised up to create a new ministry team in these dark and uncertain times. It led to me being involved in ministries I never imagined, to befriending a new family that needed God’s love poured out on them. But even our team constantly changes; S* was mobilized into the military as a driver at a local base.
Beside the feeling of constantly losing all remnants of my old life, the hardest part of these past two years may be the inability to plan for the future. I want to dream of a day when there is no war, and we can enter the rebuilding phase for Ukraine’s bright future. However, in so many ways it feels like our entire world stopped on February 24, 2022 and now we’re simply frozen in time.”
*Name removed for safety reasons.
These are some ways Rosa and her team are compassionately surrounding the most vulnerable in Ukraine:
- Evangelism through art classes for children, wives, and mothers of active-duty soldiers.
- Visiting elderly widows in local villages to deliver groceries, clothing, and to pray with them.
- Supporting a foster-family and sending their six children to English lessons twice a week.
- Delivering supplies to chaplain ministry partners on the frontlines.
- Helping 2 young guys from their ministry develop their new ministries – working with children with special needs and their families, street evangelism, visiting wounded soldiers, and sports evangelism.