It's just who I am. I remember my time at an Evangelical Protestant school for my undergraduate degree, and the 2 years of homiletical (how to give a sermon). It was a bit gruelling and my professor was particularly tough on me. One day, I was walking with another seminarian and he overheard our conversation.…
Fr. Barnabas Powell
It doesn't make sense. Jesus says some difficult things in His teachings and the Church continues this "challenge" to our intellect. The Lord says things like "If you want to be free, be a slave." And "If you want to live, you have to die." And even "If you want to lead, you have to…
If somebody would have told me my society would undergo the shifts it has gone through in the last few decades, I wouldn't have believed them. Perhaps it's a result of my increasing age when we "old folks" look at the world and say "this new generation" is changing everything (after all that's been going…
G. K. Chesterton once said "True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare."
So true. Real contentment is something that doesn't come "naturally" in a world that is always telling you you…
"That boy is so hard headed he wouldn't even notice a rock hitting him between the eyes." My grandmother had a way with words, but I've known people like this; so set in their ways that not even plain evidence would move them to change their ways. They were frozen in their thinking.
But that…
Everybody else was squirming. They were obviously having a hard time with the information and seemed to rather have been elsewhere. But I was at peace. It just made sense to me, I guess.
Some of you know the story of how I entered the Orthodox Church. I was a pastor of a growing Pentecostal church…
We had been sneaking cookies up to our room all weekend! It was fun having the sleep over with all my buddies, but we were told not to bring food up to our room! We did it anyway. That is until one of us (I'm not going to mention any names!) knocked over the end…
It seems we humans have an ingrained "love" of fighting, defending ourselves, and drama. We are really good at it. Just look at the conflicts that are raging today in our world. We seem to love to fight, and that, in itself, should be a sign of a deep brokenness in us. Our impulse to…
All too often we fall into the trap of reducing life to being "right" or "wrong." We want to be correct. We want to BE strong. We want to be right. And we want others to recognize our "rightness," our "correctness," and our strength. But what if life isn't about being right, or correct? What if…
The young man bristled under his father's rules and regulations. He hated knowing that, while he was under age and under his dad's roof, he had to buckle down and do what he was told. He daydreamed of one day being free of this harsh regiment. As he grew older, his impatience to be "free"…