A missionary to Ukraine has described how she sat on the plane and wept as her flight took off for the safety of England.
Christiana Moon said the mixture of emotions at having got out, but also at leaving her home and friends behind, was hard to describe.
Now staying with her mum and step-dad, the English 22-year-old who has lived in Ukraine for most of her adult life, explained how strange it is when people congratulate her for being home “when Ukraine is more my home than England”.
She said: “People are saying ‘welcome home’ and you’re like ‘my home is being destroyed’. I think I have been struggling with also feeling guilty for not being there. Why am I not helping in Ukraine? How can I be safe when all my friends are not like that? I guess I just have to remember that I felt God asked me to leave. So there must be a purpose in it.”
Christiana, who last week spoke to Premier Christian Radio from Ukraine, took several days to get out of the country by car, bus, train and plane, experiencing the kindness of dozens of strangers along the way.
The Youth With A Mission (YWAM) missionary said she was bought meals, met at the station, and given a bed to sleep in by some Polish Christians she had contact with through the Assemblies of God, the network her English church is a part of.
Christiana is on several What’s app groups with Ukrainian and missionary friends, hearing all about life on the ground, and said she “didn’t know whether that was better or worse” than watching the news on TV. One of her Ukrainian friends has not responded on What’s app for two days, and she doesn’t know what has happened to her.
She is reading the Bible in a whole new light now, and added: “I never thought I’d find the book of Lamentations comforting … but when there's a very real physical battle, those words, they're very real and have a lot of power and even some of the emotions that I'm experiencing, they’re in the psalms.”
“Through all of this that's confusing going on, I've just had this voice at the back of my head saying, ‘Trust me’, so I might not see the answers … I might not have for them for a long time. Maybe not even this side of heaven, but I can still trust God. And I know that that is the feeling of many in Ukraine as well. And I'm praying as well for revival because there's been lots of things prophesied over that nation. I don't think God is done with it yet.”
