Acts of Hope

Some fragmented thoughts on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, the witness of Ivanka Demchuk, an epic roadtrip, and a fat bumblebee

Aug 21, 2025

Thursday, August 21
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Several times since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I’ve checked in with the artist Ivanka Demchuk, who lives with her family in the city of Lviv. (You can read her previous updates here, here, and here.) With President Zelensky’s most recent visit to the White House, I thought it was time to hear from her again.

Lviv, on Ukraine’s western edge, near the Polish border, has been a relative safe haven. Yet each day and every night still bring reminders that the country remains at war. By day, she writes, it’s “the funerals of the brave warriors who died defending their country. There often are funeral processions through the city.” At 9 a.m. every day, the entire country pauses for a collective minute of silence: “It’s a sad moment, but also a moment of solidarity and unity for all Ukrainians.” At night, “bombing and air alerts are unfortunately a common thing.” Lviv experienced three consecutive nights of Russian barrages last month, with hundreds of missiles and drones launched toward the city. While Ukrainian defenses staved off most of the attacks, apartment buildings, a kindergarten, and several buildings at Lviv Polytechnic University were reduced to rubble. “Sometimes we are getting up in the middle of the night and hiding in the shelter. It’s even more difficult for our family because of the little kids,” Demchuk says. “They don’t want to wake up. They are crying. They are really afraid of the sound of the enemy drones over our house and the explosions we can hear.”

Wartime creates startling contrasts. “Someone on the street is struggling because her husband was just killed on the frontline, and some young student is having fun, just because he’s young and having a great day,” Demchuk says. What happens publicly on the city’s sidewalks repeats privately, in each home. Every family has lost friends or family on the front lines. “Many guys I knew from my time of studies at art college have died. My cousin is currently fighting; also, a few other men from the family and many friends too,” she says. “These men will be there until the end of the war, living without their families. And the most depressing thing is that most of the world is just getting used to this war, but every day, civilians and soldiers are dying.”

Yet life persists. She and her husband have three children; “it’s challenging.” Their eldest, Luka, is eight. “He’s a very kind and enthusiastic boy who loves his sisters and is helping us a lot with them.” Their youngest, Lina, born a few months ago, “seems to be a calm and joyful girl. She feels the attention from others immediately, and reacts with a smile and happiness in her eyes. It’s a pleasure to watch.”

Last month, the extended family gathered in Lviv, coming from Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine, for Lina’s baptism, in the same church where her two siblings were also baptized, a sanctuary that Demchuk describes as “a calm and bright place not far from our home.” In the Christian tradition, baptism is both an acknowledgment of death’s reality and a claim on the conviction of coming resurrection—a countercultural both/and built on faith in something beyond this life. “Surely this moment of baptism is unique,” Demchuk says. “It really is an act of hope. You realize that this new soul is given to God and to the world. Our baby is giving us belief for the future through her little life and sincere smile. It’s not an easy time for Ukrainians at the moment. Sometimes there are feelings of insignificance, hopelessness, and uncertainty. But a tiny child can change so much—more than it could seem at first glance.”

Baby Lina with her godparents at her baptism

As Demchuk, her husband, and the dear friends who agreed to be Lina’s godparents stood in the church, she had this sensation that she was “holding not just a baby but a whole microworld that is just beginning. There is no fear, no doubt, no wound in it yet. And your responsibility is not to let this light go out, not to let it become indifferent.” She felt the moment’s import: “You are no longer just a father or mother, but you become the one who must provide resistance, base, and support.” At the same time, she sensed a steadying gravity: “Despite all the worries of the world, there is a connection between you that nothing can break. This is what gives optimism: not loud words, but the quiet, simple presence of love that will always be with her.”

Demchuk is an iconographer. In various Christian traditions, icons have served as painted proclamation—gospel in gold leaf and egg tempera. A sermon makes its claim in words; as a 9th-century Eastern Orthodox council declared, icons testify in “the language of colors.” They bridge the faithful past and the uncertain future, such that the eye might glimpse something that helps to sustain the soul.

In many of her strikingly modern icons, Demchuk’s human figures appear small, against a murky swirl that to me represents the world we inhabit. In “Baptism,” the dove descending to Jesus is tiny. Your eyes have to seek it out, but it’s there.

“Baptism,” Ivanka Demchuk, mixed technique on canvas and wood

Demchuk is currently working on a “Way of the Cross” series commissioned by a church in the U.S. It seems apt that, as her country endures this unwanted war, her painting should contemplate Jesus’s forced march down the path of sorrows. Though she has just started her work on this project, she already feels the ongoing conflict’s effects on her painting. “My way of thinking has definitely changed through the last years of war, and I am putting some sense of those events into my work. I’m trying not to fall into a kind of pessimistic and dramatic way of thinking,” she says. “I’m searching for hope inside of my soul and in the world and people surrounding me. These are the things that give the inner strength I would like to translate into my art.”

As I read her most recent letter to me, it struck me that the word “hope” shows up again and again. How? Perhaps it’s that she and her compatriots have no other choice but to grasp for it. Toward the end, Demchuk alludes to an exchange between Frodo and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo says, referring to the rediscovery of the One Ring and the subsequent battle to secure its dominant power.

“So do I,” Gandalf replies, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Demchuk finds it remarkable that, in our times, even with all the alleged progress that the world has made, so much of the world finds itself embroiled in seemingly endless war. “That’s kind of an unbelievable thing,” she writes. “But that’s what we are currently facing as humanity.”

Yet hope can be found in other faces—not least in Lina’s smile and those of her siblings: “I’m not original in saying that my kids are my strongest source of hope at this moment.” Demchuk experiences it, too, “in little and common things—in other people, in nature, in birdsong and the rays of sunshine.” And she draws resolve from the prayers and the support from “all the people in the world who still support us and remember us. This gives some inner strength and a feeling that we are not lost, that we have good friends who are helping us to stand up for our life, our freedom, and our independence in this unjust attempt to demolish our nation.”

Ivanka Demchuk, her husband and fellow artist Arsen Bereza, and their three kids

Hope, she says, “is such an important and ephemeral thing for all Ukrainians at the moment.” It comes in simple, more immediate forms—say, the yearning for a restful night free of warning sirens—and bolder, longer-term ones, including the wish for flourishing for their kids. And though hope might be embodied most accessibly by those around her, the ultimate source comes from beyond this life. “God is speaking to us and supporting us in many different ways,” she says. “Sometimes we just need to open our eyes—and especially our souls—wider to see it.”

Prints of icons by Ivanka Demchuk and Arsen Bereza are available in their Etsy shop. You can also see more of her work on her website.

What I’m Giving Thanks for: I often think back to an essay that Nadia Bolz-Weber penned years ago. “There is not a human heart on this planet that can bear all of what is happening right now,” she wrote. The question one of her teachers, Suzanne Stabile, asked: What’s mine to care about, and what’s not mine to care about?

To be clear, this wasn’t a judgment about what was—or is—worthy of care. Nor should it be misread as permission to ignore the world’s woes. Rather, it was an admission that no one of us can personally care about, or solve, or help, everything that ails society or every problem that demands remedy or everyone that needs care.

I was pondering this last week, as my nephew Caleb and I drove from Reno, where my parents live, to Boston, where my sister lives, in Caleb’s new-to-him car, a hand-me-down from his grandparents. What was mine to care about, for those six days, for those 3,095 miles, was my nephew and his safety.

It was an epic roadtrip: Reno to Salt Lake City, SLC to Lincoln, Neb., Lincoln to Grand Rapids, a full day of rest at home to regain my composure, GR to Niagara Falls, and finally Niagara Falls to Boston. Outside Salt Lake City, we had an uncomfortably close call with a tractor-trailer whose driver seemed to forget momentarily that he needed to care about the car in the lane next to him. But other than that, our six days were filled with rambling conversation, amiable quiet, his music (mostly), and decent meals (Nodo in Iowa City makes an outstanding sandwich).

I brought Caleb with me to the community garden, where we harvested potatoes and green beans, and we soaked in the glory of Niagara Falls (our ride on the Maid of the Mist, which he described as “exhilarating,” was worth every penny). I realized I’ve underestimated his perceptiveness and wisdom; I don’t want to betray confidences, but I’ll be thinking for a while about his reflections on the consequences of being “chronically online.” During our drive, I was reminded, too, that the news will still be there next time I turn NPR on; it’s okay—maybe even good and right—to listen to the music for a while.

Caleb and me on the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls

Much like Demchuk, I find hope in the younger generation—especially Caleb and his siblings. They compel me to remember that part of my calling as an uncle isn’t just to steward what I have for the next generation but also to listen well, to learn from these young people, to let them teach me, and never to underestimate them.

I loved almost every second of my cross-country drive with Caleb—and I absolutely never want to do it again.

What I’m Growing: I returned to the community garden to find a plot flourishing from recent rains and my neglect. I’ve finally lost control of the weeds, but hey, I got to mid-August, which is better than seasons past. But the zinnias and the cosmos did just fine in my absence too.

Some of our beans are almost dry and ready to be picked and shelled for winter. But many are still blooming. Yesterday, I went on a killing spree, crushing rapacious bean beetles and squishing their eggs. Then I sat on the ground for a while, next to one particularly robust bean plant, watching as one fat bumblebee made its way from blossom to blossom. Pollen festooned its body, and still, it could not get enough.

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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