When I was a child living in Zambia our family had many close calls on our lives amongst a rather random guerilla warfare.
We were not a religious family (my dad an atheist, mom going to church for weddings, baptisms and funerals only) but while we lived there she wanted me and my sister to pray to God every night before we went to sleep.
’Levolle lasken Luojani
Armias ole suojani
Ja jos sijaltani en enää nousisi
Taivaaseen ota tykösi’
Secretly in silence I added - never having told this to anyone - that if God chose that night to take away my mother, my father and my little sister - He would also let me die.
I didn’t want to, couldn’t stand the idea of surviving all alone.
We only prayed during the years in Zambia. Not before, not after our return to Finland, Lapland.
Yet every night for those three years I prayed from my heart for my own death in case my loved ones vanished and died like so many other good people did.
There seemed to be no logic, no reason, only that us Europeans were - to my knowledge - spared and our local friends could get killed. Many did. My best friend Thimbo’s dad. Our grocery store owner. My dad’s colleagues. People we knew. Our friends.
Ukraine has triggered those memories within my soul, some of them deeply hidden till now. Yet now I now understand these secret whispers of my heart.
Ukrainian children, women and men will one day, today or another day, a year or a decade later, remember their own personal hell. The suffocating fear of it all.
This has taken me decades to make peace with. Yet their today is so much worse than my yesterday ever was.
So touching expirience.
Leave a comment