Ukraine (MNN) — What were you doing at age 23? Eric Mock of The Slavic Gospel Association tells a story from the war zone of Ukraine. “At 23 years of age, Dimitri saw there was a church with no pastor. So he left college with his friend for a time. They went into the war zone so that they could lead the church that was there without a pastor.”
Mock was actually able to visit this church and meet Dimitri on a trip to Ukraine. “I remember my wife and I driving up to the church, and there he was. He and his friend were walking out the front door with a huge bucket of soup just sloshing between them, loading it into a beat-up old car. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ They said, ‘Well, the shelling has been very difficult. So we are getting some soup to all the people that are in their bomb shelters.”
“We wanted to make sure all the elderly had cups of soup.”
It’s one example showing how Ukrainian Christians have demonstrated the hope of Jesus as the war between Russia and Ukraine drags on.
Mock tells of another time he helped these believers hand out food. “One man said, ‘We get no additional aid from the government. But you the church come out. What motivates you to come?’ And they stood there and they wanted to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The header photo shows a church in the war zone between Russia and Ukraine. (Photo courtesy of Alex Ryabchyn, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
