I Didn’t Find God in Church. I Found Him in War
When everything else was gone
This is A Glimpse of Hope, a weekly letter where I try to bring something gentle to your weekend. Small moments that refuse to vanish, fragments of grace found in the middle of collapse. Today, a story about how I’ve come to understand survival, faith, and what it means to stay human in Ukraine.
THERE’S A STRANGE INTIMACY between war and God.
You wouldn’t expect that. You’d think war would push God away. And many times, it really feels like it does.
But for me, the opposite happened.
I never prayed so much until the first missiles fell.
I wasn’t raised in a religious home. My grandmother used to sing, that was her prayer. My parents never took me to church except for funerals.
God wasn’t absent, He just… wasn’t part of our lives.
The Soviet Union did everything they could to take God out of our hearts.
Life had its logic. Science, effort, routine. If something hurt, you worked through it. If something felt wrong, you rationalized it.
33 years of independence from the USSR wasn’t enough to clean every single trace of communist life out of us.
But then war came, and logic ran out.
Just ran out.
I started looking up.
It wasn’t that faith where you light candles and feel peaceful. It was something raw.
I looked up because there was no one else left to look at.
I looked up because I was scared.
Not scared to die, but to lose my humanity in a world that had forgotten what that even meant.
I thought war would take me away from God.
But it pulled me closer.
Closer through pain. Through dark nights with no electricity, no signal, no noise.
That darkness where your soul talks louder than your mind.
And I saw something:
God isn’t the one dropping bombs.
He’s the one helping carry the wounded.
He’s in the soldier who didn’t pull the trigger.
In the grandmother feeding the neighbor’s cat.
In the stranger across the ocean packing supplies for someone they’ll never meet.
And yes, God is in science, too.
I remember reading about DNA once: 3 billion base pairs holding every living thing together, and it didn’t push me further from God.
It felt like seeing His handwriting.
Science didn’t shrink God. It made Him bigger.
DNA isn’t random. It’s an alphabet, a language. And someone wrote it.
But the most difficult part to understand was why He allows suffering.
Why let this happen? Why let children die?
Why let evil walk so freely?
And the only answer that made sense to me was: free will.
I’m not talking about the polite version of free will people use to explain bad decisions. I mean here the terrifying kind.
The one that lets tyrants rise, and innocent people fall.
That allows us to choose love, but also to choose hate.
That one that means God doesn’t pull our strings. He lets us write our own story, even if it destroys us.
War doesn’t make sense. But love doesn’t either.
It’s not logical to risk your life for others. It’s not rational to rebuild a city that might be bombed again. It’s not efficient to forgive.
But we do these things anyway.
And the more I saw people doing them, the more I saw God.
God, to me, is not somewhere far away, watching us.
He’s right here, holding the broken pieces with us.
Not the author of evil, but the answer to it.
I read once that a prayer was found on the wall of a Nazi concentration camp. It said:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when there’s no one there.
And I believe in God even when He is silent.
That’s how faith looks like in wartime.
Not certainty. Not peace. But persistence.
Not answers, but presence.
I’m not telling you this to convert you. I’m saying it because I met Him here.
In the darkness. In the ash. In the stubborn choice to believe that love matters even now.
Ukraine didn’t bring me to God.
It showed me He was never far.
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Viktor, once again, you have captured not only the painful experience of living through an unjust war, but the essential experience of being human. Thank you.
I am writing this through tears, Victor. What you say mirrors my own personal experience of finding God through raw pain. Some months ago, my beloved grandson took his own life. I can never describe the pain....those who have been through it, know. And I am sure, of all people, you can understand it. I wanted to feel angry at God, for not, somehow, preventing this. But instead I felt closer to Him than I had ever felt before.....as if, in spite of all, he had me in the palm of His hand, and shared in my grief. I don't know if you are familiar with Mother Julian of Norwich, an early Christian mystic? She said ''All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" It is something I whisper to myself, at my saddest, darkest, moments. When I grieve for the suffering of the world, especially in Ukraine, as well as my own loss and pain. I pray for you, and for all of us who are suffering.