I work on our blog in fits and starts. I should feel guilty about that, but I just know that life is full and some things don’t happen the way I had hoped.
One thing factoring in, I have realized, is that my hope of conveying here some of what life was like over our year in Kyiv would be a sort of reliving those long, dark, heavy months. When we were there and in it, we were just doing what was next. We were all together, an odd sense of camaraderie in a time of war. I say ‘odd’ because, strangely, in all of the heaviness, all of the darkness, all of the jolts from this or that news, there was a lightness (I cannot think of another word) born of being in it together with so many others.
It is rare to have such a broad sense of shared experience, at least for me, because I and we live such an odd life relative to the people we are with in any given time. Now that it’s just Mark and I at home, we mostly look to each other in a given moment when we want that sense of, ‘you get this, you were there when…’ – whether it was the funny memory of some travel mishap or the shared anguish of something horrifically hard. In any given place wherever we are in the world, there are huge parts of me that are invisible to the person I’m with – my Ukrainian friend and neighbor really just cannot fathom what my mind sees when I am speaking of my home city Houston. And my Texas people truly cannot fathom the incomprehensibility of living in a high-rise apartment building and using an elevator any time I just want to go out to the car.
But to have experienced, with thousands and tens of thousands of people, the hardships, the crazy, the jokes about the ‘schedule’ for electricity outages – there was a comfort in that which is hard to explain. I think it met an important part of us that God created for us to have deeply, which seems so hard to have in this modern life, and that is a deep need to be in community with, to ‘fellowship’ as it were, in this case, because of enduring, forced difficulty.
So as much as it was an idea to try to give a sense of what those months were like by my previous posts, I think I’m not going to keep going through my little journal with those. Hopefully what I did write gave some idea, but it seems like it’s time to move on. Dear Nancy likely won’t know that she’s the impetus for me writing today, but I want to make a goal of writing here more frequently. And maybe give myself permission for the posts to be encapsulated snapshots rather than a coherent, overarching narrative. I so want to use this tool to communicate some of what life is like, what the Lord is doing in me/us, or whatever, for many reasons that I won’t search for clear articulation on right in this moment.
May you know the Lord’s presence in a profound, personal way as you go about the rest of your day, and if you need it, may you know a bit of peace and even joy in making a course correction on a plan or idea, all for his glory!
McDonnels in Ukraine 