I used to play guitar with Kireal who opened for Metallica at the Moscow Monsters of Rock.  I also played frisbee and soccer with other Russian friends I’d made.They were coming to the church I was leading worship for. A brand new church plant in Moskva. I was 19. The Soviet Union had just fallen. Socialism killed it. I was witness to it firsthand. 

As I’d walk to the metro I sort of stood out. I was fresh out of Bible college and a summer of working construction in Hawai’i. My hair had grown long and I had been surfing a lot. I didn’t look like I’d just emerged from a Moscow winter when I arrived at the airport that spring. My friend Jim had given me some sweet LeHigh boots. They were matte black leather with a soft finish and a steel toe. They laced high and stood atop a 3/4 inch sole and an inch and a half heel. LeHigh makes safety boots particular for construction, and Jim’s union had a yearly replacement offer on boots. He’d gotten them free and gave them to me. They were weirdly audacious boots, you could just barely wear them outside of a work environment. The sort of boots someone might be seen wearing outside a mosh pit. Just punk enough for suspicion but very safe when working among molten material.

Add to that another thing I’d found in some donated boxes at the church, a denim trench coat,  the sort you’d find in a donation box. The trench coat was in great shape, like it belonged to someone who thought they’d invest in a trench coat as a personal rebranding thing but it didn’t take. Looked great when they had bought it but it was too much commitment to wear publicly. He couldn’t ‘send it’ as my boys might say. He probably just went back to sideburns and the brand new coat was in the donation box for me. Well, I rarely lack the send necessary for a fashion statement, so I wore this outlandish denim trench coat and these quasi punk platform shoes ready to get scuffed for safety but stylish enough for a mosh pit. With bleach blond hair down to my back and this garb I might have been a sort of oddity to one of my 20 million hardened muskovite neighbors. I almost married a Russian girl named Alla Terekhova. I loved her and her grandmother’s borscht. She is a sister in Christ and I still love her and her husband Tim.

What I am saying is that I am brother to the Russian people. My first mission was to the Russian people, and I have a longstanding love in my heart for Russian people.

And I am brother to the Ukrainian people. I was sent there by God afterwards. I have ministered in Kiev and prayed with many of them to receive and grow in Christ. I have sown into Ukraine and love them as well.

Nobody really has a right to judge in this war based on what they are hearing. It is media garbage with overt propaganda and diabolical censorship. It is curated information, woven together by a script. It is operation mockingbird from the same government that’s funneling billions of dollars to media outlets to push a pharmaceutical agenda in the name of public health.