Devastation Identification

“I’ve never celebrated Victory Day before.” 

“Well, your country’s land wasn’t taken away.”

We stood in Chişinău’s Memorial Park on May 9^th. The sun was blazing: I felt my shirt bond to my sweat-beaded back as I walked behind my friend up the park steps to a stone-encased flame that burned in front of us. A crowd stood silently behind a waist-high wreath of flowers surrounding the flame, the lilac-stack slowly growing as people placed one stalk upon another to commemorate the Soviet Army’s victory in 1945. The park is referred to as “Park of the Eternal Flame” because the flame burns continually as a memorial to Chişinău’s unknown soldiers who died in WWII. Only on this day, May 9^th, is the park filled with flowers. Walking past rows of tombstones, I beheld what was for me a novelty: every tombstone had a heap of flowers before it. Not a one was left unadorned.

As people milled around us, my Moldovan friend and I talked about Victory Day and what it means for Eastern Europe. Not only in Chişinău but in all of Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet nations, school is cancelled on this day, businesses are closed, and parades dominate the streets. Speeches are made, patriotic songs are sung, and military cemeteries are full of people paying homage to those who fought to free their land. We talked about how, compared to Moldova, America is a new country. What I didn’t realize until this point was how many times Moldova has changed hands. I’ve never known the confusion or torn allegiances resulting from foreign occupation. My country has defended herself and others while successfully staving off foreign rule. To understand how Moldovans value not only Victory Day but land that is finally their own, I had to do a little research on where this 22 year-old country came from.

Don’t start snoring, and don’t reach for the popcorn. You won’t have time. Prepare for the most-abridged history of Moldova you will find. 

From the 14^th century through the 1990s, Moldova repeatedly changed names and hands. Inhabited since antiquity, the land was first called the Principality of Moldavia in the late 1300s. Shortly thereafter it was referred to as Bessarabia, named after a dynastic line, and included modern-day Moldova and smaller portions of Romania and Ukraine. Bessarabia was controlled by the Ottoman Empire until the Russian Empire gained power in the early 1800s, and the Ottomans ceded a portion of Bessarabia. After the Russian Revolution, a Bessarabian council proclaimed their region’s independence as the Moldavian Democratic Republic. Later that year the council petitioned for unification with Romania, and it became a territory under Romanian occupation. 

Fast forward to World War II. The Soviets would not recognize Bessarabia as part of Romania, and through a pact with Romania signed in the late 1930s, Bessarabia became Soviet territory, and its boundaries were redrawn to those of present-day Moldova. Its name was changed to the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Romania regained the region in an Axis invasion the following year, but by 1944, the MSSR belonged once again to the Soviet Union, as did Romania. Romania was free from Soviet occupation by 1958, but not the MSSR. They remained in Soviet grasp until 1991, when they gained independence and changed their name, for the last time, to the Republic of Moldova. 

Whew. 

So, Victory Day. Moldovans celebrate the end of WWII. But for Moldovans, this day resolved the war but not the issue of land ownership. Between the original Victory Day and the Republic of Moldova was forty-five years of occupation by the third regime to control the land.

They just wanted their land. And they struggled long and hard to get it.

Having daily seen a new piece of the world for the past eight months—and having this recent reminder of land disputes and war—I am gaining more insight into the connection between land and people.

Additionally, throughout the month of May I was reading through Jeremiah, and the prominence of land in the book arrested my attention in a way it previously never had.

The purpose of Jeremiah's prophecies was to warn the people of Judah to turn from their rebellion or face the consequences of being exiled from their land. In the times of the major prophets such as Jeremiah, land represented promise. It represented blessing, and inheriting land was one of the weightiest blessings bestowed on people by the Lord. That their posterity would inherit land for coming generations was the cry of Israelite hearts for centuries. And still is today.

The biblical imagery associated with descriptions of punishments on and blessings for land is vivid throughout Scripture, but growing up I had difficulty processing the gravity of what I read. My mental framework just hasn’t been able to accommodate a ravished land, save for photographs I’ve seen in Voice of the Martyrs magazines, history textbooks, and new clips. Such images wrenched my heart, but my attention was held for only short spans because I could not identify. Enter Moldova.

I’ve never lived among a people in distress or poverty for an extended period of time until now.

Heaps of rubble from broken-down buildings and unfinished houses adorn forlorn lots and street corners. The maimed and the elderly beg. Churches charge exorbitant prices for weddings, funerals, and baptisms. Medical care comes to the poor only if they can pay bribes. These facts are common in much of the world, no doubt, but these lacerations of injustice smart each time I encounter them.

Let me pause here and explain that Moldova is at once a country of beauty as well as of pain. As I type, fruit trees are weighed down by apricots, cherries, and plums. In the vineyards, fluorescent-green sprigs wrap themselves around wires, promising hefty grape clusters come fall.  Forests are lush, hills are green, and the sun shines.

And this blend is what jolts my thoughts. I have never seen beauty and wreckage co-exist in a land in such a way.  

No, Moldovans aren’t living under foreign occupation. But with each glance out my window, each walk through the neighborhood, each drive through the city center, I see daily reminders of former foreign occupation and a present tired earth.

You see, Moldova never fully recovered.

It is still smoldering in post-Soviet ruins. When WWII ended, Moldova’s political climate did not calm. The region was overlooked by a burgeoning Soviet regime that put its money and time into its more lucrative countries, and when the USSR weakened and Moldova gained independence, it never built back up. 

Maybe the irony of this blog’s timing has crossed your mind already. As I type this on the heels of Independence Day, I think about the fact that for the past 237 years, we’ve been the United States of America. We’ve never been occupied or carried off into captivity by the north or south (as were the people of Israel), becoming the United States of Canada or Mexico. And while I don’t place my trust in our country’s military might or claim that we’ll fight off all foreign threats for all time, my cultural programming has given me little material to work with for identifying with a people who have fallen under control of a foreign power.

Until I came to Moldova, I could never quite grasp the pain incurred at the taking away of one’s land and the resulting devastation. Because of the connection I’m forging with this country, I’ve begun to ache a little more in empathy when I read Jeremiah’s words about land-related judgments. In a book of 52 chapters, the word translated in English as land is used 190 times (in the NASB). In Jeremiah 4, when the prophet calls Judah to repent of their spiritual rebellion, the consequences come upon the land: a “great destruction…to make [the] land a waste” in which “the whole land is devastated” (vv. 6-7, 20). 

When Jeremiah prophesied at Jerusalem’s temple gate, he explained that if the people of Judah wouldn’t change their actions and re-orient their trust, God said that He would “make to cease from the cities…and streets…the voice of joy and gladness…for the land [would] become a ruin” (7:34). In Jeremiah 12, God answers Jeremiah’s prayer as to why the wicked prosper by first acknowledging the condition of the land: “[The land] has been made a desolation, desolate, it mourns before Me; the whole land has been made desolate, because no man lays it to heart” (v. 11).

Moldova is not experiencing drought, nor is it vegetatively desolate, but the desolation that strikes me about this country is holistic, not one of land only. And as I read through the book of Jeremiah, I noticed a repeated theme: Physical judgment came as a result of spiritual rebellion. Internal rebellion manifested itself in the brokenness of the land.

Now, what I am not saying is that Moldova’s impoverished condition is solely the result of spiritual darkness. What I am suggesting is that with a spiritual repositioning can come physical change. 

You see, the glory that shot through the messages to pre-captive Jerusalem spills over the stone walls of Moldova: devastation is only half the story. What comes after is restoration.

Restoration.

Although I’ve selectively focused thus far on land references with negative connotations in Jeremiah, land is also mentioned in promises of restoration—oftentimes immediately following words of land-tied judgment! As Ronald Youngblood points out in his introduction to the book of Jeremiah, “God’s judgment of His people (and the nations), though terrible, was not to be the last word, the final work of God in history. Mercy and covenant faithfulness would triumph over wrath. Beyond judgment would come restoration and renewal.” 

Today, God’s chosen people are no longer confined to those born within a strip of land in the Middle East. In his book The New Testament and the People of God, N. T. Wright notes that in the Old Testament, “the land….functioned as the geographic identity of the people of God.” Today, the identity of the people of God is not linked to any particular geographic location. Because of Christ, there is now “no sense in which one piece of territory could possess more significance than another” (Wright, New Testament and People of God). As people living after the resurrection of Christ, Christians in Moldova, the United States, and all over the world are God’s people awaiting a restoration much like the ancient Israelites—except that ours unites us less to a landmass than it does to a victorious, reigning Christ.

As early as Jeremiah 3, God describes Judah’s polluted land in the first ten verses and in the last fifteen verses He invites repentance. With the turning of the heart comes the flourishing of the land. At that time, His people would be “multiplied and increased in the land...that [He] gave to [their] fathers as an inheritance” (vv. 16, 18). Peppered before, during, and after descriptions of a restored land are God’s heartfelt calls to his people to return to Him. If only they will return to Him, not only their land but their hearts will be turned and restored.

In chapter 30, God promises to restore His people by means of rebuilding: “I will…have compassion on his dwelling places; and the city will be rebuilt on its ruin” (v. 18)[.] The Hebrew word for ruin here is tel, and it refers to a mound or heap of ruins “resulting from the accumulation of the debris of many years or centuries of occupation” (NASB Study Bible). When I read this for the first time, a ray of hope shot through my heart. One of the first things that struck me about Moldova, and which I still notice, are the heaps of rubble throughout the cities and countryside resulting from houses under construction (and deconstruction), abandoned buildings being stripped for raw materials, and waste sites. I am now able to envision this passage in a literal sense: When I read that God promises to rebuild over the heaps of spiritual and physical rebellion, I know His change is coming.

I recently heard a pastor here say, “Eastern Europe doesn’t need a revival, it needs a vival; there hasn’t been one before, so we’re not repeating anything!” When I pray for Moldova, my prayers are split between the physical and the spiritual. I pray for relief from poverty, a restructuring of the economy that will create jobs, a government that divides authority and places power in the hands of the people, care for the elderly, better medical technology, and abundant harvest seasons. Yet I know that many of these changes come as a result of a spiritual awakening. So I also pray for personal relationships with Jesus, theologically sound discipling within local churches, and for desperation to function as a driving force that draws people to seek the One who will be found by them. 

As I pray for Moldova's physical and spiritual restoration, I am reminded of my need--and your need--for restoration. Our spiritual condition is not strictly tied to where we reside, and regardless of how we got to where we are and who we are, the Lord offers His promise of restoration. If the book of Jeremiah had a motto, maybe it would be "Return to me!" It's all He asks of you. And He offers your very life in return. 


So when my temples are catapulted against rutiera windows because of the fissures in the road, when I walk past the scores of frayed trees wilting from the smoke of burning trash heaps beneath them, when I look out at the valley and see the faint grey smog coating the city at sunrise, my heart does a little twisting. I ache for the current condition of the land and its people, and I am reminded of how my own periods of spiritual rebellion result in varying degrees of devastation. How powerful are visual reminders. 

And as soon as that sobering message sinks in, I hear a faint whisper rising off the pages of Jeremiah and into my heart, reminding me that restoration is coming. 

For Moldova. For me. For you.

 

May prayers and action open the way for God to move in the depths of the soil and the depths of hearts. May this land--and yours--be restored from the inside out.

Praying for this Land,

Renée