One of the most difficult realities I've had to face as an adult, as a priest, as a husband, and as a father is the waking up to the reality of the complexity of each human person I encounter, including myself. This continuous process of discovery has me regularly seeing places of spiritual progress and…
We really have succumbed to such a consumerist mindset that the Pavlovian trigger of "sale" actually has us queuing up outside the "box" retailers to wait in the cold to get a slip of paper that gives us permission to purchase a product at a particular price so we will "have" the product. One begins…
So, why is it so easy to take advice from a stranger, but not your own family? Alright, I'll confess to being a bit frustrated. Here's the story: I had a dear family member bend my ear for several hours about a problem. At the end of this marathon, I gave what I thought was…
Did you see this?
"Thank you, Fr. Barnabas for daily encouraging words. I am not Orthodox...yet. I am inching my way to the faith. God bless you."
This is what we are able to do when you keep Faith Encouraged Ministries growing!
And 2018 is offering us some wonderful challenges/opportunities.
We Need to update our web presence and…
How can you tell if a relationship is healthy or not? All of us wonder about that from time to time, and it's natural to wonder.
But the truth is we are all on a journey in life and, unless we stop now and again and assess where we are, we are going to look…
"I'm sorry, I don't believe you." With that, I watched as our suspect in a series of robberies squirmed in his interrogation seat. My chief of detectives was a master at this kind of questioning, and all our evidence showed this man was the one who had been breaking into several shopping strips in our…
He would say things like "Mr. Powell, words are your tools. Would you trust a mechanic that just tossed his tools around his shop as if they meant little to him? Words are your tools, Mr. Powell. If you aren't going to use them well, you are an unfaithful steward of the gift God gives…
"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,…
I hated what was coming and, what made it worse was, it was unavoidable. It was a confrontation with a supervisor that had been building for some time, and it wasn't going to be pretty. As he and I sat in the office of the consultant that the company had brought in to help several…
The transformation in our world from a time when slavery was a "peculiar institution" to 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…