He loved scaring me. I had a buddy of mine who thought it was hillarious to sneak up behind me and yell as loud as he could. Of course, I'd jump two feet off the ground and he'd just laugh and laugh. After I stopped shaking, I'd laugh with him. It was fun. After a…
Fr. Barnabas Powell
One of my favorite words is "purpose." The reason for this is because I'm convinced that it is a sense of purpose that enables a person to endure the hard work of becoming who you really are. And make no mistake, discovering who you really are is not just difficult, but absolutely impossible without some…
Tuesday, Make a Gift That Share Eternity!
"Hey Father, For what it's worth I just want to thank you. Your Orthodox bootcamp series on youtube really helped me get started on my journey to Orthodoxy. I do not know how to express my gratitude for all that you have helped me to understand. Thank you, God…
"Every calamity is to be overcome by endurance." Virgil
Most of us know someone in our lives that just seems to be able to stay with a challenge until it is overcome. The truth is we are amazed at the endurance of some in our lives. How do they do it? I knew a man a…
As a boy, I loved the old Popeye the Sailorman cartoons. Every afternoon, we'd come home from school and my grandmother would let us watch the Popeye Club on channel 5. It seemed each episode would have the patient and good Popeye put up with some shenanigans from Bluto. But then Popeye would say his…
If you've hung around these parts for a while, you know already what I'm going to say: Spiritual maturity is a particular emphasis for me. And the reason for that is because it is precisely what I lack and what I long to have. The reason why I lack it is because my will is…
"What you need is an attitude of gratitude." The trainer was teaching us new salesmen how to keep positive in the face of rejection. You see, it's being told "no" over and over again that usually brings somebody's sales career to an end. If you don't know how to stay positive and focused and motivated,…
"He just doesn't get it." Two of my friends were talking about me and they didn't know I could hear them. They were right. I didn't get what they were trying to teach me. My mind doesn't work that way. They were both trying to teach me how to do some complicated electrical wiring for…
The transformation in our world from a time when slavery was a "peculiar institution" and a time when the notion of "purchasing" a human being is unthinkable is nothing short of wonderful! And yet, human trafficking is still a very real crime in our modern world, even in our own "land of the free."
Look…
I'm not a big, outdoorsy, guy. So, camping out was never something I really enjoyed, except for this one time. Me and my best friend, Mark, had a great "fort" in the woods near our apartment complex in Orlando when I was about 11 or 12. Being central Florida, the pine trees in these woods…