The Delusion of “Scarcity”
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...
The Weight of Past Mistakes
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...
Learning to Weather the Storm!
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...
Providing For Him
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...
Moved With Compassion
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...
They Believed
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...
The (Very Common) Golden Rule – Sunday’s Homily
God instilled in humanity all across the world "the Seed of the Word." This is God's thumbprint that proves God wants you to know Him AND to know yourself! It is the Orthodox Christian Faith that uniquely teaches we humans how and why we observe the Golden Rule. And...
Shall We Look For Another? Tempted to Give Up!
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...
Be Watchful, Be Sober – Irvine, California
Dear Faith Encouraged Faithful, I'm looking forward to being at St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church on October 28 and 29 and they celebrate their parish Name Day! We are going to be exploring how St. Paul directed the early Christians to develop the spiritual disciplines of Attentiveness and Spiritual Sobriety so...
Welcome to Our New Home (I HOPE!) 🙂
OK, here we go! Here's praying you are seeing this this morning! We have worked hard to transfer all our devotionals from 2012 to now in this new home. I am so grateful for all the work of our Tech folks at Faith Encouraged to work through what became a...