My Heart for Ukraine

(Laura McKillip Wood is a former missionary to Ukraine. She wrote this column over the weekend. On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops into eastern Ukraine.)

Laura McKillip Wood

The river flowed silently as I rode in an old Russian-made car on a country road running along a riverbank. I wondered what the name of the river was. Using a tiny Russian/English dictionary, I somehow managed to ask the driver.

“Dnipro!” he exclaimed, pleased he had finally understood my question.

“I remember studying that river in high school,” I told my friend, who was traveling with me. “The teacher never knew how to pronounce it. Now I know!”

I was 19, a sophomore in college, and this trip was full of first experiences: my first commercial airline flight, first time out of the country, first time living with a Ukrainian host family. I went on to spend several summers during college living in Ukraine, and when I graduated in 1995, I moved there to teach American missionary children. That move brought more firsts: living in an apartment of my own and learning to shop, pay bills, furnish a home, and go to church in a different culture.

I lived in Ukraine for five years. I made some of the best friends of my life there, both American and Ukrainian. I met and married my husband, Andrew, another missionary there. “Life-changing” does not adequately describe those years. Needless to say, I have watched the events unfolding in Ukraine with anxious interest.

LUBA AND VALIK
After moving back to America in 2000, I kept up with friends in Ukraine. My former roommate, Luba, married her husband, Valik, a year after my husband and I married. We had babies at roughly the same time. Valik, Andrew, Luba, and I have had careers in Christian higher education. Our lives have differed in a significant way, though. With the tension between Russia and Ukraine, Luba and Valik worry about what will happen if Russia takes over.

“We both have trouble sleeping,” she says. “We wake up at night and listen for the sounds of gunshots. We have things ready so we can leave at any moment.” But, she adds, they might not be able to flee if there is fighting. She sees her friends struggling with anxiety and uncertainty. “We hear threatening news every day, which is just so exhausting, but we try to live our lives as normally as possible.”

ANYA AND ANDRIY
Other friends, Anya and Andriy, raised a large family in Crimea. When Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, they fled with their children to western Ukraine, moving away from their mothers who had nurtured their family over the years. Eight years later, their children have grown, and Anya and Andriy work with ministries in the outskirts of Kiev.

Anya says she feels good about her children living their own lives; several of them are in western Ukraine or other Eastern European countries. The separation that affects them most is being apart from their moms. Both Andriy and Anya’s mothers still live in Crimea, which is now part of Russia. Anya feels the separation deeply as their mothers age.

One of Anya and Andriy’s sons has been in the military since 2014, and one is in the reserves.

“I am learning to entrust them to the Lord,” she says. “Our children have to decide what they will do with their lives, and we support any decision.”

She says people in western Ukraine are living their lives as normally as possible, although they are preparing for conflict. This has been evidenced by shortages of things like radios, which would be needed if the internet goes down.

JOHN AND IRYNA
John has lived in Ukraine since the 1990s. He married a Ukrainian woman and now lives in Odessa and runs a ministry there. He and his wife, Iryna, have two children. They have plans to leave, if necessary, but he says, “Fleeing a country that you’ve poured so much of your life into for so long is a tough pill to swallow.”

If they leave, they might lose their home and be banned from reentering the country. His children would have to start over—new culture, new school, new life.

Watching this unfold in a country I love, thinking about the people I love who still live there, I cannot help but feel nervous. What will happen? How will my friends survive this? I see them facing this with faith and strength, as they have faced many adversities over time. They express the conviction that God will take care of them. As Anya does with her sons, I try to entrust them to God.

Laura McKillip Wood, former missionary to Ukraine, lives in Papillion, Nebraska, and writes about missions for Christian Standard. She serves as bereavement coordinator and palliative care chaplain at Children’s Hospital and Medical Center in Omaha. She and her husband, Andrew, have three teenagers.