Last week the DHM mission team arrived back from Ukraine, exhausted but exhilirated. We clocked well over a thousand miles on our travels within Ukraine, travelling from the capital, Kyiv, to the eastern Dnipro region and back again. We became “wanderers for the love of Christ”, always on the lookout for signs of the Kingdom of God wherever we went and whomever we met.

We visited a number of amazing projects where we saw people showing the most amazing love and compassion in the most desolate situations of pain and suffering. There are heroes at work in Ukraine. We may not notice them from a distance here in the UK, and these heroes don’t make a big show about their work, but they are there and we have witnessed how our friends and partners on the ground in Ukraine have chosen, often at great personal cost, to devote their lives to serving the sick, the lonely, the poor and marginalised – the kind of people who will never be able to reward them.

Reflecing on the trip, this is what has impressed me most: people sacrificing so much to save people’s lives, serving and blessing others without any thought of personal gain or reward.

Seeing the love, warmth and genuine compassion of these heroes in Ukraine reminded me yet again that there is a kindness in the heart of God, which perforates into the deepest caverns of human misery. The kindly light of the gospel penetrates even the most dismal hollows of hell and this light is none other than the light of Christ that conquers the world and illuminates all things. As the Bible puts it so powerfully: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not withstand it.”

Stay tuned for some more specific updates and reflections from the trip…