On June 9, 2023, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Stream senior contributor Jason Jones delivered a message of courage and faith to pro-patriotic, pro-family Ukrainians attending the “Life, Dignity, Victory” summit there. Here is what he said to them:

It is a privilege to be a participant at this historic “Life, Dignity, Victory” summit, sponsored by the Chalice of Mercy foundation. I founded the Vulnerable People Project over 20 years ago to stand with communities facing ethnic cleansing, genocide, and total war. The fundamental truth I have learned in two decades of standing with the vulnerable is this:

Vulnerable communities are made up of strong people placed in seemingly impossible situations.

But when thoughtful people are inspired to stand with them, the impossible becomes possible, and the vulnerable can triumph over their aggressors.

As a husband, as a father of seven, and as a grandfather, I see my work through the lens of fatherhood. The thought of the children of Ukraine experiencing terror, suffering, and loss has inspired me to leave my own family, on the other side of the world, and be here with you today. To stand with the husbands, fathers and grandfathers of Ukraine as they fight to honor the sacrifices of their forefathers, the security of their families and the destiny of their yet unborn descendants.

The Battle Today

The people of Ukraine are engaged as a nation in a solemn struggle for something sacred. Right now, you fight for your national independence and historic borders.

Ukraine’s culture, faith, language, and boundaries were gifted to you by your ancestors. They’re the fruit of uncountable sacrifices by millions of your forefathers: farmers and tradesmen, herders and craftsmen, mothers and nuns, priests and apostles and soldiers. Their names are lost to history but remembered by God in heaven. Most of our names here today will likewise go unremembered — it’s the fate of ordinary people, those of us who don’t carve our fame in the history books by acts either famous or infamous.

Our Legacy Is their Lives

But each of us leaves a legacy in the work we did, the children we raised, the souls we touched, and our simple acts of love. And in the fabric and texture and historic reality that is Ukraine, you see the accumulated legacy of a people — your people, your ancestors who sweated and bled to leave a world behind for you. And for your children. And for the Faith that sustained them through persecution and poverty, conquest and occupation.

It couldn’t be clearer. Your legacy is being threatened. To shrug and allow foreign invaders to erase your culture and rob you of your posterity is the gravest kind of impiety. But that is not what Ukrainians have chosen, as the world now sees each day on the news from the battle fronts.

Why Borders Matter

Borders are important. When colonizers and occupiers impose their will on helpless countries, they draw arbitrary lines that efface history, erase cultures, divide communities and provoke future wars. Organic borders that reflect a nation’s history and respect its integrity are critically important, as Ukrainians all know.

We see that people need more than borders. They need self-determination, genuine freedom, the liberty that only comes with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the noble view of humanity that follows close behind it. When the people of Ukraine prevail, and preserve its boundaries, when Ukraine regains every square inch of its sovereign territory, I pray it happens soon with minimal loss of lives.

What then? Will that come with renewed sovereignty and a real independence? Will it be the free Ukraine your ancestors dreamt of and fought for? Will the nation carry on its culture, faith, traditions, and all those sacred values that solid borders exist to protect?

The Line in the Human Heart Dividing Good from Evil

While physical borders are important Cultural and spiritual borders are even more important. We protect our borders to preserve life, culture and dignity. Your cultural and spiritual borders must be defended with the same daring and fortitude in which you are fighting to defend Ukraine from Russia’s war of aggression.

Will Ukraine trade Russian colonizers and occupiers for post-Christian, post-Western ones? Will it turn over its children to the counselors and therapists who now in America quietly recruit kids for sex-change procedures, puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgical castration of boys—often without the consent or even the knowledge of their parents? Will Ukraine let Planned Parenthood — which designed the murderous One Child Policy on behalf of the Red Chinese government — open clinics in Kyiv that would rob you of a generation of children, a new Holodomor in service of a new godless ideology of evil, to finish the job which Josef Stalin started?

In a Ukraine colonized by destructive ideologies, the ordinary citizens will not rule themselves any more than they did behind the Iron Curtain.

Trading the Iron Fist for the Velvet Glove

I think everyone here will stand with me, and say, “Absolutely not!” You will say, “We are not fighting to trade one set of foreign masters for another, to swap out openly brutal and thuggish colonial masters who rule with the iron fist, for smoother, slicker, manipulative masters who rule by the velvet glove.”

I believe, and I pray, that you will not let foreign special interests and media masters throw away the fruits of your suffering, squandering not only the blood spilt in this war, but the blood, sweat, and tears of a thousand years of ancestors.

We Will Live in Hope

I’d like to close with the final words of a book I published nine years ago, warning the world against repeating the horrors that tormented the 20^th century. I hope we can issue a Ukrainian edition, because it’s something I think you might find helpful. The title is The Race to Save Our Century. Here’s how it ends:

We can treat people as if they were robots, ghosts, or beasts. We can starve, enslave, imprison them, or kill them. But that doesn’t change the reality. If we look up, and also within, we will find the mysterious image and likeness of God. We will discover the truth that we and our neighbors have an incomparable beauty and worth. A dignity that no one can take away.

Our thousand-year reichs, our workers’ paradises, our brave new worlds, are ghastly fantasies that human beings create, and that history duly comes along and exposes. And what is left behind, bruised and battered but still unbowed, is the face of Man—as noble and as beautiful as Adam reaching out his hand to the God who made him.

We will remember that, and we will do what is needed. We will feel from the depths of our hearts to the highest flights of our imagination a love of the good, a hatred of cruelty and smallness of soul, and a loyalty to each and every member of our family, the human family. We will fight to enshrine the basic principles of decency in our political, economic, and personal lives. We will have courage. We will prevail.

Slava Ukraini, Heroyam Slava! (Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes)