A prayer for Ukraine

Can you imagine having to evacuate your home? I remember once living through a particularly bad wildfire season in Washington State and having to leave our home unexpectedly and on short notice. The memory of running through the house throwing vital belongings into trash bags still lingers with me as an adult. The experience was distressing and unsettling.

Thankfully, we were able to stay at the apartment of friends an hour’s drive away while the fires raged. Also, news reports were notoriously unreliable. We heard twice that the fire had burned through the area in which we lived, and even that ‘structures had been lost’. It was a chaotic time.

All of this was only a small taste of what a refugee must endure in the unspeakable destruction and degradation of war. An estimated 3,000,000 Ukrainians have left their homes and fled in cold weather to the border of surrounding nations— Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Moldova—with only the belongings they can carry.

In the midst of this invasion and the ensuing humanitarian crisis, the well-known British composer John Rutter has drawn attention to the Disaster Emergency Fund, a UK-based humanitarian relief organization that provides necessities to Ukrainians who have fled their country. He has done this by writing a new choral anthem. 

Rutter has offered the work for free and has asked that people make a gift to the DEF in lieu of buying copies. The words of the prayer, translated from Ukrainian, are simply this:

O God, protect the Ukraine.

Give her strength, faith, and hope, our Father. Amen.

Disaster Emergency Fund Appeal

Donate via the DEF by clicking here.

—Justin Appel, Director of Music