Father Alejandro was the first person I truly knew in Ukraine.

Share

I arrived here near Christmas 2025, alone, my military application still being processed, with more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. I knew nobody. I set myself one task, find a Catholic church with an English-speaking priest. There were many churches. I found one. I walked in, sat through the Mass, and when it was over I went up to him, asked for a few minutes of his time, took him to one side, and told him everything.

Just like that. A stranger and a priest, and I told him everything and right then and there, it began.

Over the weeks that followed, through my military application, through the waiting, through the uncertainty, we met again and again. I couldn’t tell you how many times. We would talk about life, about faith, about the war and what it does to people. He introduced me to others. He even tried to help me court a young woman once, a story that ultimately didn’t go the way I hoped, her parents deciding a soldier wasn’t quite what they had in mind for their daughter. But it wouldn’t have happened at all without him.

When I went into basic training, we kept calling. When I was on mission, thirty-two days out, under fire, in positions that tested everything I had, we would find moments to call. Brief ones. But he was there on the other end of the line, and we would read and pray together. A priest in Kyiv and a soldier in a bunker somewhere, doing morning prayer over a phone connection that kept cutting out.

I have a screenshot of one of those calls. I’ll never delete it. This dispatch is not really about Father Alejandro leaving. It’s about what his friendship reminded me of, something I think most of us know but rarely stop long enough to feel.

The people in your life are not permanent fixtures. They are gifts, given for a season, and the season has its own end that you don’t get to choose. One minute they are here and one minute they are not, relocated, or changed, or simply gone in ways you didn’t see coming.

Don’t take your time with them for granted. Not a single minute of it.

Tell the people you love that you love them. Have the conversation you’ve been putting off. Make the call. Show up. Be present when you’re with them rather than half somewhere else on your phone. The memory I’ll carry of Father Alejandro isn’t a grand one. It’s the small ones. The cups of coffee. The conversations that went longer than either of us planned. The prayers said together in the cold.

Those are the things that last.

To my dear friend and minister of Christ, Father Alejandro. I love you, brother. Jerusalem is lucky to have you and I will find my way there one day to prove it.

Until then, dear friend.

Subscribe now

If so, you’re not alone. Neither am I.

Share

I have lost count of the number of times I wanted to take matters into my own hands. The times the anger rose up hot and clean and I thought, I could deal with this myself. Right now and it would feel good. I grew up feeling wronged. By people, by circumstances, by a world that seemed to operate on a logic I couldn’t quite accept. And for a long time my instinct was to fight back, to match every wrong with a response, to make sure nobody ever got away with anything at my expense.

It took me a long time to understand that this instinct, as human as it is, belongs to a smaller version of me. A version that measures justice by what it can see and touch and immediately satisfy. God’s justice is something else entirely.

Leave His wrath to Him. Not as passive resignation, not as weakness dressed in spiritual language but as a genuine act of faith. Faith that the scales will be balanced. That nothing done in darkness stays hidden forever. That every wrong will be answered perfectly by a God who sees everything, everything you have suffered, everything that was done to you in private, everything you never told anyone.

He saw it. He sees it still and He will answer it.

The man who bears wrongs with dignity and faith is not a pushover. He is not naive. He has simply decided that God’s justice is worth waiting for and that his own peace of mind is worth more than the temporary satisfaction of revenge. There is a freedom in letting go that I cannot fully describe. Not the freedom of forgetting, you don’t forget. But the freedom of no longer carrying it as a debt that needs collecting. You hand it over. You walk lighter.

Let it go. Let God handle it. He will and He will do it far better than you ever could.

Subscribe now

I don’t know your name. I don’t know your face, what language you dream in, what makes you laugh until you can’t breathe, or what quietly breaks your heart. I don’t know where you are right now or what you’re doing as I write this. I know where I am though. I’m in Ukraine. It’s late, I’m starving, It’s cold, and I’m thinking about you again. I do that more than I should probably admit.

I want to be honest with you from the start, uncomfortably honest, because I think you deserve that more than you deserve a polished version of me. I am a mess, to put it mildly, I struggle with things I’m ashamed of. I fall and get back up and fall again. I have a temper I’m still learning to govern, a pride that surfaces when I least expect it, and a longing for you so deep it sometimes aches in a way I can’t fully explain.

I’m currently in a warzone. I have been blown up, I have dragged wounded men and somehow the thing that makes me feel most exposed, more than any of that, is writing this letter to someone I’ve never met.

Share

What I want in you is simple, though the world has made it rare.

I want meekness, not weakness, meekness, the quiet, unshakeable kind. I want a pure heart. The kind that has survived this age without being hardened by it, without being hollowed out by it. I want to look at you one day and feel something close to tears, not from desire, but from the sheer grace of who you are.

I think about what our life could look like. Wherever God sends us. Whatever it costs. I think about praying beside you, not just near you. I think about the children we might raise, the home we might build, the way everything I’m doing out here might one day make sense when I’m looking at you across a table.

I’m not there yet. I know that. I’m still becoming the man who deserves to find you. Every discipline I try to build, every confession I make, every morning I choose the harder path, some part of it is for you. For us. For the life I believe God has been quietly preparing on both ends. So I wait.

Imperfectly. Restlessly. Hopefully.

Wherever you are tonight, I hope you’re safe. I hope you’re loved. I hope you know, somehow, that someone out here is trying to be worth finding. Wait for me. I’m on my way.

With love,
Jonathan.

Subscribe now

I mean that seriously. Not as a provocation, as a genuine question worth sitting with because the alternative to reaching your potential isn’t comfortable mediocrity. It’s a slow, quiet suffocation. Nine to five, going through the motions, day after day, never once asking whether the life you’re living is actually yours. I believe God has a destiny for every person He creates. Not a vague, romantic notion of destiny, a specific one. A calling. Something only you can do, in the way only you can do it, in the time He’s given you. And I believe that when you’re not on that path, your soul knows it. It doesn’t let you rest.

I know this from experience.

I’m twenty-one years old, still young, I know, but there was a time, not long ago, when I would lie in bed after school, after college, after the gym, staring at the ceiling in the dark. Hours of it. Night after night. I stared at that ceiling so long I’m surprised I didn’t bore a hole through it.

But I wasn’t wasting time. I was seeing something.

Share

I was picturing my life. A soldier. A fighter. Someone who serves and contributes and stands for something. Then it matured, politics, speaking for the voiceless, helping the needy. A wife. A family. A life with weight and meaning to it. I pictured it so vividly, so repeatedly, that it stopped feeling like a dream and started feeling like a destination. Something I was moving toward whether I was ready or not and now I’m here. In Ukraine. On mission. Living the thing I used to picture from a ceiling in England. That still astonishes me sometimes.

This is not unique to me though. Think about the men of previous generations, men who had none of the distractions we have today, no smartphones, no endless streaming, no algorithm feeding them someone else’s life to consume. They sat with themselves. They pondered. They wrestled with what they were made for, what they owed their families, their communities, their God. They didn’t have the luxury of drifting, survival demanded that they figure out who they were and get on with it.

We have lost something in the comfort. We have so many ways to avoid the ceiling stare, to never sit alone long enough with our own thoughts to hear what they’re actually saying. And so we drift. We consume. We scroll. And the calling, the real one, gets quieter and quieter under the noise until some men never hear it at all.

I was restless until I started moving toward that vision. Anxious, stressed, angry at myself and the world in ways I couldn’t fully explain. Now I sleep soundly. Not because everything is easy, it isn’t, because I’m where I’m supposed to be.

That restlessness you feel? That low-grade anxiety, that sense that something is missing, that the life you’re living isn’t quite yours? Don’t medicate it. Don’t distract yourself from it. Listen to it. It might be the voice of God telling you that you were made for more than this.

Find your ceiling. Stare at it. Then get up and go.

Subscribe now

I’ve been watching Bridgerton.

All four seasons and I’ll be honest with you, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. The architecture, the dances, the articulation, the romance, the food, the furniture, the sheer beauty of how people carried themselves. There is something in that world that stirred something deep in me, a longing for elegance, for civility, for a life ordered around beauty and meaning rather than noise and convenience.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Share

Not Bridgerton specifically. But what it did to my perception of reality.

Movies, series, music, they are not neutral. They are carefully constructed alternate worlds designed to make you feel something and if you’re not careful, if you’re not anchored in what is actually real and actually true, you begin to measure your real life against a fiction. You begin to ache for something that doesn’t exist. You begin to drift.

Truth requires your full attention. Reality demands that you be present in it, not escaping from it and you cannot grasp truth, cannot live by it, cannot fight for it, cannot build anything real on it, if you are perpetually retreating into someone else’s carefully lit, perfectly scored version of what life could be.

This is not a call to stop watching films or listening to music. It’s a call to watch yourself watching them. Know what they’re doing to you. Know when the escape becomes avoidance. Know when the longing they stir in you is pulling you toward something real or away from it.

The world needs people who can see it clearly. That requires being in it.

Stay present ladies and gentlemen!

Subscribe now

With love, Jonathan.

WARNING: Some images viewers may find disturbing.

Share

Three metres.

That's how close it came. A Molniya, a rocket with wings, came straight for me across an open field and landed three metres from where I'd been standing half a second before. I don’t know why I looked up when I did. I don’t know why my legs moved before my brain told them to. I dove left, full kit, rucksack, rifle, over the foliage like some kind of desperate rugby tackle against death itself.

Then the impact. Then silence for a moment that felt much longer than it was. I lay there thinking one thing: how am I still here? I still don’t have a better answer than this, Jesus Christ kept me alive out there.

The infill took six days on foot. Several kilometres through terrain that wanted us dead in multiple ways simultaneously. Artillery. FPV drones. Fibre optic drones, the new ones with razor-sharp blades attached, slow and low and searching through the treeline.I watched one of those things cut straight through the branches above us without crashing, without stopping. Just violating what was supposed to be our cover and continuing on.

At one point my brother and I got separated from the main formation. Pinned in a bush. An FPV hovered over us, coming and going, coming and going. Not attacking, but waiting. It took me a moment to realize what it was doing. It was holding us in place so the artillery could zero in. We sprinted three hundred metres and didn’t look back. One of our Ukrainian brothers took a wound early on. Under fire, we treated him, dragged him on a stretcher. He’ll live. Look at the picture if you can. He nearly didn’t.

But here’s the part that stayed with me longest. Not the near miss. Not the drones or the artillery or the sprint across open ground. The old men.

When we finally made it into the position and the worst had passed, I found myself sitting with a group of Ukrainian soldiers. Old men. Poorly equipped. Men who should have been at home drawing pensions, watching their grandchildren grow up. They had a dog. He’d lived in that position for two years. It was his home. I have a picture of him, look at his face. I have a picture with those old men too. Look at them. Ukraine has more weapons than it has people willing to hold them. Young men are fleeing while the elderly fill the line. I won’t pretend that doesn’t make me angry. I won’t pretend it doesn’t break my heart at the same time.

We shared tea and chocolate. Crackers and honey. Small things that felt enormous out there. I got to know them a little. They were good men. I’m writing this from the position we took refuge in after the infill. Tom Odell playing quietly. The same old men around me. Still getting bombed. If you’re reading this, it means I made it back. Three metres. That’s all it was.

Let me give you a personal example.

Right now I’m on a position I’ll hold for over a month. I’m blessed, in a strange way, to patrol landscape this beautiful and breathtaking. But throw back a year, when I’d finish a late night shift at Asda, a supermarket chain in England, I’d arrive at my house, park, shut the door, and the cold night air would hit me and stop me dead in my tracks.

I’d look up. The stars. Absolutely breathtaking.

I’d walk to the front porch, and just before putting the key in the door, I’d turn around, lean on the fence, and take a deep breath. Just to take it all in.

I dare you to do it too. Tonight, before bed, look up at the sky. Look at God’s creation. You’ll feel it, that sense of vertigo, that sudden awareness of how small you actually are against all of it.

That’s not meant to frighten you. It’s meant to remind you. Don’t carry your problems like they’re the end of the world. They aren’t. Look up. Be in awe.

I make the Sign of the Cross before each patrol, a leap of faith, everything placed in the hands of the Almighty. Is this the patrol God destined to be my last? I don’t know. Nobody does.

What I do know is this: I step out wondering whether I deserve the day He’s given me. I am a wretched sinner and I know what I am before God. And yet here I stand, rifle in hand, asking Him to bring me home every single time, and you know what, He does.

That itself is the answer. Survival is not luck. It is not chance. Every morning God allows you to open your eyes is an act of mercy, and every act of mercy carries within it a calling. He is keeping you alive for a reason. No matter how far you’ve gone down the road of unrighteousness, no matter how far you think you’ve fallen, if God keeps you alive every single day, then you still have a destiny He wants you to fulfil. He has not finished with you yet.

Whatever that may look like.