Category: The Morning Offering

I am Forever Grateful for the Love of My Mother The most important gift I received from my mother was the gift of love. She loved me, and demonstrated her love for me throughout my childhood. She also showed me how to love others, and that ability to be willing

We Priests are Ambassadors of Orthodoxy It was relatively late in my life when I embraced Orthodoxy. Already forty-one, I’d found myself wandering in a spiritual wasteland, knowing I was drying up spiritually, and hoping there was something out there that would fill the void. Orthodoxy had not been in

Our Hope is Eternal Because God’s Love is Boundless  If we are attentive to all the Lord does for us, we will endure those times when our prayers seem to go unanswered. That God is not always giving us just what we think we need, in no way means he

God’s House is Entered with Awe and Fear We must practice reverence in the temple, whether during services or when we step into the church to light a candle and venerate the holy icons. The temple is the place set apart for the worship of the Holy Trinity and is

The Orthodox Practice of Standing for Worship Standing before God has been the only acceptable posture for Orthodox Christians from the earliest of times. We recognize that a faithful servant would never sit before his master, for the faithful are all servants of the Lord, whom we worship as we

We Must Decrease While Christ Increases When we work on strengthening our relationship with God, our love increases for all those around us. By deepening our faith we diminish the estrangement between ourselves and others, and increase the bond between ourselves and God. This is our true vocation, that we

A Defeatist Attitude is a Prescription for Defeat As Christians we must believe that our ultimate welfare is in the hands of God and recognize that our life, although filled with many difficulties and struggles, is a journey of anticipation to the Eternal Life that is to come. Because this

Worship is the Main Work of the Church Orthodox Christianity is primarily known for its worship, for the core of our Orthodox Christian life is to be found in the services conducted in our temples. I read somewhere that during the height of the Soviet period of repression, a Roman

Anything That Is Quickly Obtained Is Also Easily Lost Americans are not a particularly patient people, as demonstrated by the fact that the fast food industry began with us. We don’t tolerate slow service, thus much of the food we consume is prepared before we order it. We drive our