It was actually, physically, painful to hear her say those words. I was at the point of both tears and disbelief. You see, we had the opportunity to help some homeless people in our community by participating, as a parish, in a wonderful ministry to homeless families in our...
Edgar Allen Poe writes the psychologically terrifying "Tell Tale Heart" and we watch as the guilt from a murder drives the murderer crazy thinking he hears the heartbeat of his victim. This guilt is destructive to the man in the story and we can readily understand the horror of...
Jesus warned us that "you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are...
It's time to reset what we think "normal" is. For too long we have reduced a Normal Orthodox Life to merely going through the motions. Our parish family has recently done a very thorough and difficult Strategic Planning Initiative where we worked hard over the past few months to...
Is compassion enough to make real change or make good decisions about how to live your life? There are so many voices in our culture today that claim to justify choices about actually changing timeless moral virtues based on their insistence that they are compassionate towards persons who have...
There's a wonderful little video running around the internet making fun of those who claim the original apostles and followers of Christ were all lying to get ahead. They lied about the resurrection so they could be powerful. Well, if that were true, they were a bunch of idiots, because...
Life can be discouraging at times. A wise man once told me this during a particularly discouraging time in my life: “Son, don’t quit when life is tough. You don’t throw your ticket away just because the train goes through a dark tunnel!” I still remember that today. And...
To say that marriage is a hot topic today would be an understatement. But, you have to understand that the motivation for all this controversy about marriage today isn’t new. And it isn’t about equality or fairness or even compassion. It’s about attack. It’s about the real, yet unstated...
The fact is if I went to a garden store and bought a tree they said would grow pears, and, after I planted it fertilized it, watered it, and did all the work to grow my pear tree to maturity so that I could eat my own pears, I...
He was actually bragging about being the best at being the worst! I’m not kidding! I sat in front of him staring in absolute disbelief at what I was hearing. I was lamenting the shallow commitment of my own heart to the rigorous practice of the Faith when he...
