Candles for Ukraine

Today the weather has been near perfect with warm sunshine, cloudless skies a good breeze for drying the washing and tete-a-tete daffodils blooming for the first bumblebees. All the daily things that make life worth living. It seems hardly possible that the atrocity of war is being played out over Ukraine and their skies clouded with the smoke of bombardment.

So, the bidding prayers today were for the Ukrainian people. At coffee afterwards members of the congregation with family in Eastern Europe huddled together and talked with solemn faces, for who knows if Russia will be content with Ukraine.

My two candles were for Ukraine certainly and also for my two sons, living in China and Australia. Suddenly, nowhere seems very safe anymore. For, not only is it a tragedy for the individuals caught up in the fighting, not only a bitter blow against the freedoms of democracy, but most frighteningly it is a deliberate act of desecration of our planet, a juggernaut based on treating the world as a bottomless pit of resource when there is so little time left to combat global warming. The Ukrainian people are bearing the brunt of this destruction now, but climate change, driven by policies such as Russia’s, are affecting every nation on earth