By Grayson Hester
The Body of Christ, broken for you, need not be a loaf of bread or even a gluten-free cracker. Sometimes, the most nourishing, the most eucharistic manifestation of communion comes in the form of a tortilla.
Sometimes, Sabbath is merely a good night’s sleep. Sometimes, the holiest grail is not a grail at all, but a grill, aromatic with spices.
In the shadow of a grinding war, exiled from the country they have been called to serve that became their home, Gennady and Mina Podgaisky break bread, offer this Sabbath and ignite restoration.
This couple, once stationed in Ukraine, now living in Poland, practice the simplest, yet arguably most Christlike, ministry one can.
“It’s the Four Rs: Rest, Recovery, Restoration, Recharge—the ‘Four R Ministry,’” Gennady said.
Ever since Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it is precisely this ministry—not theological treatise nor evangelical conversion—that has been called for. As the war already lasted three-and-a-half years, with no tangible signs of slowing, the ministry grows ever more indispensable.
It is sacred in its simplicity. The Podgaiskys, called now to neighboring Poland, provide shelter for those either traveling to or traveling from Ukraine. They offer these travelers, escaping or traveling to cold hostility and dangers, a warm bed; among bleak indifference, a listening ear; in the face of privation, abundance.
“Every week, we have Ukrainians staying in our home; when we’re home,” Mina said. “We knew we would have a ministry of hospitality, but we didn’t know it would be such a big and an important part of our ministry in Krakow.”
The theater of politicking and gladhanding, whether in Anchorage or Brussels or D.C., dominates the headlines and commands the most attention. But the real work of wartime compassion occurs not in meticulously arranged meetings or staged photo ops, but every day in unglamorous confines and by plain people—to those and with the most affected, who have the most at stake in the outcomes.
It includes those awakened by constant air raid sirens, who lose the basic privilege of sleep night after night; who find their theological understanding and capacities for forgiveness blown to rubble; those whose spirits are choked on shrapnel and pain and grit and horror.
It is to these refugees—and to Americans, Europeans and anyone who is coming to help—for whom the Podgaiskys open their doors.
“I don’t let our guests do anything around the house. They’re going to be taken care of. In my home, we will serve you. We both cook for them, take care of them. Often, they sleep 10 hours and say it’s the most comfortable bed ever,” Mina said. “They often say, ‘I didn’t know I could take a siesta that long.’”
Gennady calls it “invisible ministry,” given that its outcomes and successes are largely unquantifiable. But its import—that’s unmistakable.
Once the travelers—be they everyday Ukrainians, pastors, aid workers, what have you—feel adequately rested, it is not uncommon for them to want to process their feelings and talk.
“If people stay several days, we spend many hours talking. One time I counted 16 hours of talking and mostly listening to them,” Gennady said. “Not 45-50 minutes of formal counseling—it’s talking or listening for 16 hours out of the 72 hours they have been in our house. They needed it and we were holding that space for them, and they felt much better.”
Here, the Podgaiskys provide another kind of respite. For their guests’ bodies, they make a bed; for their souls, they make room—room to be angry, to be imprecatory, to be unforgiving.
No judgment is passed in these 16-hour conversations. No sanctimony hovers in the air; absent are petty moralities or inadequate “shoulds.” Replacing them instead, is bitter honesty—holy, hard and healing.
“We give them theological respite and permission to not forgive right now. We let them speak,” Mina said. “We alleviate their guilt, no guilt at this point. Christ did not force us to forgive. We work to that point.”
Invoking the oft-misappropriated passage in Ecclesiastes 3—“for everything there is a season”—the Podgaiskys privilege presence over preaching, recognizing that a desire to forgive cannot withstand a bombing any more than a hospital or orphanage or apartment building can.
Beneath the shellshocked material reality lies an even more pressing question—that of a God who would allow this to happen in the first place. On the surface burns one’s home; under the scorched earth smolders one’s very faith.
The Podgaiskys dutifully attend to these wounds, as well. “They (and we) pray and pray, but the Lord is not answering as to when the war will stop,” Mina said. “We give them permission to bide time. This is a time for war, not a time for forgiveness—other than praying for it to stop. There is a time for everything. First, you need to be safe and alive—reality is that it’s hard to forgive someone who’s trying to kill and destroy you on a daily basis.”
In manners restful, psychological and theological, the Podgaiskys create that very safety. But of course, the most potent symbol of nourishment—so potent that Jesus Himself chose it—is food. They combine their shared heritages and backgrounds to set a truly overflowing table, florid with color and dizzying in its scents, a sensorial sabbath for those more accustomed to want, with gray, mere sustenance.
“I’m an Indigenous Mexican. We practice apapacho, which means ‘to hug your soul,’” Mina said. “When you come to our home, we apapachamos your soul. We’re going to love on you and care for you.”
Pursuant to her ancestry, Mina commonly prepares breakfast burritos, arròz and other staples, taking great pains to have on-hand corn tortillas in a country where such delicacies are nigh impossible to find. Meanwhile, Gennady, perhaps having been influenced by his time in America, commands the grill with the best of them. For those of us in the States, it’s commonplace as to be mundane. But for those in Eastern Europe, it’s nothing short of a miracle etched in charcoal.
“Many people in America have grills; it’s not the same in Ukraine,” he said. “You wait for the summer, and you picnic somewhere in nature. To haul the charcoal, you have to bring everything on the bus, so ‘grilling’ is very uncommon. Because we have a gas grill in our backyard, people would say ‘Wow! You can cook/grill outside in the winter?!’”
For their esteemed guests, no request is too outlandish, no cut of meat too fanciful.
“It’s like an expensive restaurant,” he said. “Grilled steak, or any kind of meat, grilled vegetables, baked potatoes, grilled fish, are big for them. I use spices they’ve not usually tried. And it’s not uncommon for them to request, ‘Can you do the same type of chicken you did months ago?!’”
Most of their guests stay just one or a few nights. But the care they receive lasts far longer, having been nourished by the everyday extravagances of bed, conversation, food and community. In the same way that the Spirit imbues the mundane elements of bread and wine, transforming them into markers of miracle, so too are these offerings consecrated.
For now, the war shows no signs of stopping. But neither do the Podgaiskys.
“This is how we create beloved community—around the table. There are always people here,” Mina said.