"I'm Here"

Some fragmented thoughts on the humanity of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his call for solidarity, Lenten discipline, and songs of solace

Mar 04, 2022

Friday, March 4
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Greetings, dear reader.

I’ve been thinking during these awful days about two words that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to his people last week.

“I’m here.”

I don’t know why exactly they have echoed in my spirit, but I’ve been turning that sentence over and over in my mind. Perhaps it was the heart that you could hear in his voice—an unexpected tenderness, a remarkable conviction. The cynical might say that this is the least you’d expect from a seasoned performer. Yet he has done what other world leaders in dire circumstances have not: He has backed it up with his body. He has stayed in Kyiv. He has showed up, sometimes in a T shirt, sometimes in a flak jacket, to speak to and for his people.

I’m here.

To speak such words amidst war and in the face of terror is profound and powerful—and so stunningly human. Sometimes in the midst of geopolitical conflict, we forget that the leaders of a battle are human. Zelensky is a husband, a father, a son, a brother. Reared in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, he spent part of his childhood in Mongolia and learned to speak Ukrainian later. He has a law degree, but chose to pursue a career first as part of an improv troupe and then in acting and television comedy. He created and starred in a political satire called “Servant of the People,” in which a high-school teacher unexpectedly becomes Ukraine’s president. He appeared on Ukraine’s version of Dancing with the Stars. Perhaps my favorite detail about his body of work: He’s the Ukrainian voice of Paddington the Bear. His multidimensional humanity matters. He helps us remember that Ukrainians, too, are more than victims of a Russian invasion; they are family members and neighbors, creators of art and stewards of beauty, imperfect people and bearers of the image of God.

I’m here.

In his inaugural address in 2019, Zelensky spoke candidly about the challenges facing Ukraine as well as the opportunities. He also provided a glimpse of how he sees the presidency: “I really do not want my picture in your offices, for the president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.” Read now, those words seem like a prescient rebuke against any temptation to elevate him to hero status. To proclaim someone a hero can effectively dehumanize them, making them distant and exceptional. To see someone as human invites a different response.

I’m here.

Even as Zelensky meant his words to be comfort and consolation, reassurance and reminder, it also felt like a challenge. It was an exhortation to listen. It was an encouragement to pay heed. And it strikes me that so many others, in their own ways and in their own contexts, are saying the same thing but in a different timbre, in a different place, and with a different texture.

I’m here.

From others, we might hear these words as a plea, as a call for needed attention. I think, for instance, of those who endure violence, war, and suffering in places further from the headlines—Ethiopia, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Yemen. From others, we might hear them as a cry for solidarity. What about the Uighur or the people in my beloved Hong Kong? From others, we might hear them as a protest, as the defiant reminder that their lives matter, even when society’s structures and systems suggest that they do not. What about those in the United States whose bodies continue to bear the costs of discrimination and bigotry?

I’m here.

My point is not to overwhelm you with all the world’s griefs and sorrows. Rather, my hope is to nudge you—and me!—gently: How do you—how do I—want to respond to such words? I’d like to believe that I might say: “I’m here too.” I’m here to do more than gawk or consume. I’m here to help. I’m here to serve. I’m here to be a good neighbor. I’m here to push back against injustice and hate, violence and wrongdoing. I’m here to give what I can, whether it’s time and/or money, prayer and/or support. I’m here to bear witness to what’s good and offer balm against what’s painful.

I’m here.

Perhaps your version of “I’m here too” will mean donating money toward humanitarian aid in Ukraine or in another place that’s going through hardship. Or perhaps your task might be to write a note of encouragement to someone who feels lonely. Maybe you’re called to show up at a rally or contact your legislator in solidarity with someone being harmed by a particular government policy. Or maybe you can send a hurting family a hot meal. Perhaps you can volunteer at a soup kitchen or a food bank. Or perhaps you can simply listen to someone who hasn’t felt heard. Maybe you can amplify the voice of someone with a worthy message of inspiration. Or maybe you can share what you have in excess with someone who is experiencing lack.

I’m here.

Earlier this week, Christians all around the world marked Ash Wednesday, the day on the Christian calendar when we are reminded that we came from dust and to dust we will return. That I am here, that we are here, is both a miracle and a mandate. Fashioned and enlivened by a force beyond us, we are compelled, every one of us, to look beyond ourselves. Crafted out of love, we were made to love. And love is what I hope will ripple out through this aching world when any of us says, “I’m here.”

Detail from “Tiberias Lake,” by the Ukrainian artist and iconographer Ivanka Demchuk. You can see more of her work in her Etsy shop.

If you wish to support aid efforts in Ukraine, a list of vetted organizations can be found at standforukraine.com. Another innovative way to provide direct and material support to Ukrainians is to book an Airbnb in Ukraine. Airbnb is waiving all of its fees for such bookings. A tip: search for a private room in someone’s home, which increases the likelihood that your money will go directly to a family, not to a hotel-management company.

What I’m Reading: Jimin Kang, a lovely writer whom I got to know a bit during my time at Princeton Seminary, offered some reflections on an unusual Lenten discipline in a New York Times piece this week: She gave up English. So thought-provoking.

Amanda Lehr’s “Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ,” from McSweeney’s, made me laugh. For instance: “Very inconvenient class! Always holds lectures on top of mountains, in middle of the Sea of Galilee--but never close to the main campus.” I won’t spoil the rest.

What I’m Playing: Like so many other people, I’ve been playing Wordle—and, because I’m not just a word geek but also a geography nerd, a derivative called Worldle. Each day, you get a silhouette of a country or a territory, and you have to identify it. It’s not as dependent on luck as Wordle is. With each wrong guess, you get two clues—how far away you are from the right answer and which direction you ought to go on the map. It’s been giving me a few dorky minutes of respite each morning.

This is what a Worldle game looks like. As with Wordle, you get six guesses but I’m just showing you my first incorrect guess from today’s. It was a tough one!

What I’m Listening to: One of my commitments this Lent is to find ways to remind people in my life that I cherish them. The Secret Sisters, a duo from Alabama, has a gorgeous, stirring song called “Hold You Dear” that... well, just listen to it. I especially love these lines: “And I will hold you dear/ While my shadow’s long and my eyes are clear/ I know these days will pass away/ So I will hold you dear.”

Lately I also find myself drawn back to an old favorite, “Immanuel’s Land,” adapted and sung by Audrey Assad. When I preached my senior chapel at Princeton Seminary, I asked my friends Wes and Hana to sing this hymn, the soundtrack to so many moments of struggle for me. This is the reminder I need so many days: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved’s mine. He brings this weary sinner into his house of wine. I stand upon his merit; I know no other stand. Glory, glory, in Immanuel’s land.”

The words were written in the 1850s by the British poet Anne Ross Cousin, who worked from letters penned by the 17th-century Scottish preacher Samuel Rutherford. In 1630, while pastoring in a small town called Anwoth, Rutherford lost both his wife and his two children. Several years later, he was imprisoned for treason for speaking out against changes in the Church of Scotland. After being freed, he continued pastoring and also became a professor of divinity at the University of St. Andrews. But after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, Rutherford again found himself on the wrong theological and political side and again was charged with treason. The words of the hymn are drawn from these different periods of his life. Though Audrey’s version includes only three stanzas, you can find all 17 (!) if you scroll down here.

A few weeks ago, I invited any question you wanted to ask, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything to write about. I will answer others another time, but one question seems particularly apt for this moment: How do you understand the evil in the world?

“Powers and principalities, examples of systemic human evil, are not hard to see. Jesus spoke about Satan, and I struggle with things that separate me from God every day. But I recoil from what I see as the cartoonish concept of ‘the Enemy.’ There’s something about this framing that makes me queasy and it’s hard to put words to why. Maybe it seems misleading, deliberately simplistic, to wrap evil up in a single tidy entity. Evil seems so much bigger and more dispersed and entrenched and mysterious than that. I’d love to hear what you think.”

Look, I went to a conservative Christian high school where we had to read This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti for English class; if you know, you know. So it’s hard for me to shake the cartoonish concepts of the Enemy that were imprinted on me in my youth. I welcome continued prayers for my liberation! Anyway, people much more learned than I am have written volumes on evil and the suffering that results from it. I agree that evil can seem so enormous. I also believe it’s so insidious because of how intimate its effects can be, unleashed as it is on particular bodies and particular identities. What restrains me from easy caricatures of “Enemy” is my understanding of my own capacity to act in evil ways—in other words, how easily I can become an enemy, how easily I can hurt another person, how easily I can be all that I say I’m against. I’m just one word, one action, from being the thing I’d like to demonize.

But I’m also always one word, one action, from being the thing that brings hope and expresses good and reminds someone of love. That, of course, can seem like incredible pressure. In my better moments, what steadies me is my conviction—not my certainty, but my sometimes fragile conviction—that grace is real and God redeems all things. How? When? Why not now? I wish I knew. For now, though, I have the witness of the compost pile and the testimony of the stubborn leaves that are already insistently poking their way through the still-cold soil and the sermons preached by the birds that keep returning to sing their song of perseverance and the examples of so many gorgeous humans in this world who, despite the odds and the circumstances and the gazillion manifestations of hate, choose the way of love.

God’s love has to be so much powerful than any enemy. God’s beauty has to be more wondrous than any evil. If evil is big, then the God I choose to believe in must be bigger. If there wasn’t at least a tiny part of my heart that believed this to be true, then I’d be either a raging hedonist or a puddle of despair or maybe both. But there have been weird happenings in my family’s history and strange moments in my own experience that whisper of that love and resound with that beauty and shout of that power, such that the memories of them keep me going. If that sounds like foolishness, well, then I guess I’m glad to be a fool. Thoughts? Reactions?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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