Dear Faith Encouraged Family, The older I get the more I struggle with the challenges with reaching our youth with the power and the importance of our precious Orthodox faith. One of my greatest tools to help me address this challenge is the Crossroads Summer program. Please make sure your...
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will...
What if every time you turn around, no matter what happens, it ends up helping you? It seemed like it was one of those days. All the traffic lights were green. Even the cars in front of me were moving along at a good speed. My favorite song came on...
Our busy lives really do challenge us in keeping our priorities in the right order, don’t they? We moderns are a complicated mishmash of schedules, opportunities, affluence, and “freedom.” And that multiplication of events, desires, hopes, and advertisements don’t seem to be slowing down. It seems that each new day...
An Ancient Faith Blog The post Perfect Love Casts Out Fear! appeared first on Faith Encouraged.
The great, ancient philosopher Lao Tzu said “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” And I would, arrogantly, add that the first step in mastering yourself is truly knowing yourself. And that, my angels, is much more profound than...
“This world is not my home. I’m just a’passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door. And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” That’s an old spiritual that I use to sing as a boy in...
I know, I know, it doesn’t make sense right off the bat. But it really is true; God wants to GIVE you everything He has! AND, you’re going to have to WORK for it! I really do get why this paradox is so confusing and, frankly, off-putting. How can both...
The old saying is “It is easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.” And while that may be true, our real lives have shown is that we will most likely have to resist temptation more than we will be attentive enough to avoid it! But that isn’t all bad....
I never will forget the moment in college when I was confronted with the question “how do you know?” It was in an undergraduate philosophy class and I had actually never really thought about “how” I knew things. The fancy name for this is “epistemology.” And epistemology is the study...