This image has nothing to do with politics, ethnicity, or “culture wars,” it has to do with a staggeringly piteous image that has truly rent my heart over the last 24 hours and the genuine agony of soul it depicts…Last month, Iryna Zaruska was stabbed during a transit ride. That is horrific. But, after the attack, this young woman—this dear creation of our God—sat curled in her seat, hands covering her eyes in shock as her life slowly slipped away….That is what moves me to make this picture.
This picture is not polished, it is a prayer. And I want to invite it to be your prayer as well. Our God is outside of time, and so our prayers to Him are heard—and acted upon—regardless of historical sequence. So, in making this image, my prayer has been that THIS would have been Iryna’s experience in those final moments. That when she sat in that chair, covering her eyes, dying alone—that she was not alone, and that she would have known herself to be not alone. That the Man of Sorrows, the Slain and Risen Lord Christ would have descended to her in the Sovereignty of His Suffering Love and folded her in the healing embrace of the tears He shed in her place and washed her in the cleansing torrent of the blood He poured out for her. May it be, dear God…May this picture be a prayer that you would have been pleased to answer in those minutes on that train.
“Thus says the One who is High and Lifted up, who inhabits eternity… ‘I dwell in a High and Holy Place, and also with the one who is of a crushed and lowly spirit…to revive the heart of the crushed.” – Isaiah 57:15
May the God who inhabits eternity and is unbounded by time, the God who declares Himself on the Heights of the Cross as He descends to the Depths of our Sorrow—may *this God* hear the prayer offered in this image and meet this particular crushed one with saving, comforting, healing mercy in her final moments—may she not have been alone.
///
But there are so many other tragedies, why don’t you speak of them — b/c of this image. This image of this little girl dying “by herself” demanded a response. This sketch—made in haste, but in prayer—be one such response. And may it be an answered prayer.
