Becoming Orthodox (How to join the #Orthodox Church) youtu.be/n5iyZZqpRYg?si=A6Rl…

We baptized four people into the holy Orthodox Church yesterday. We have many more in the pipeline. Glory to God!

Redeem the time In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. The walk of a Christian life is a difficult one. The way is narrow. The world is full of tricks, traps, and diverse wiles to pull you off the narrow path. We get distracted. Sin is literally posted on large shiny billboards or put on public display, hoping that we will lose sight of the path, causing us to lose the surety of our footing within the faith and subsequently fall. We fall, and we rise again.. Yet, we cannot close our eyes, for while we do not have the right to participate “in the unfruitful works of darkness,” we must not remain silent when the lawless deeds are being done, when we hear blasphemies and outrages against our faith,” as St. Luke of Crimea exhorts. We cannot stop walking, for doing nothing leads to a spiritual and moral stagnation, leading to a death before death. The Orthodox faith is one of activity, for let us remember that every instance of the word faith in the Gospel of John is a verb, for indeed we do that we believe. We cannot turn around, the only way is forward, for conscious apostasy, the rejection of Christ and the Church, is of far greater consequence than simple non belief or ignorance. The path is narrow, but we know where it leads. It was often called by early Christians “The Way.” Saint Basil remarks when describing life’s Journey that: “life has been called a “way” because everything that has been created is on the way to its end. When people are on a sea voyage, they can sleep while they are being transported without any effort of their own to their port of call. The ship brings them closer to their goal without them even knowing it. So, we can be transported nearer to the end of our lives without our noticing it, as time flows by unceasingly. Time passes while you are asleep.” Yet, even when we are awake time passes for all of us, but many may not notice it. Are we redeeming that time, or simply watching it fall like sands in an hourglass? We do not know how much sand remains. The cloud of unknowing prevents us from knowing the day and hour. The time is not ours to possess, as Saint John Chrysostom says: The time is not yours, but belongs to the world... You are strangers and sojourners. Do not seek honor, do not seek glory, do not seek power or revenge... bear all things. In this way, you redeem the time. Buy it up from the hands of those who would steal it from you. Pay the price of humility and patience." Orthodox theology distinguishes between two types of time. There is chronos, the linearity of time stretching out before us, the seconds ticking away on the clock, the very ship that carries us on our journey. Yet, there is also kairos, the purposeful and opportunistic. Kairos is the present moment where God intersects with human history. Understanding this, redeeming the time means to actively rescue the present moment from distractions and sin, transforming it into kairos, an opportunity for salvation. Kairos is taking the helm of that ship, or throwing out its anchor. Chronos is the vessel. Kairos is how we interact with that journey, guiding our ship into Christ’s quiet harbor. Even the mundane can be opportunities for us to redeem the time. What is our first thought of the day when our alarm clock rudely rushes us back into the day? Rescue the first minute, the first moment, the first thought of your day with a prayer: ‘Glory to thee O Lord, Glory to thee!” Do we encounter a traffic jam or an unexpected long red light? Be patient in humility, and quietly recite the Jesus prayer. We are deeply focused on a task and we are interrupted. Are we quick to irritation or anger? I am guilty of this and not doing what I am about to say here, but stop, take a breath, look them in the eye and see this person as your narrow path in that moment. When you pass a Church or a cemetery, do we do so without thinking? Take a moment to pause, say a quick prayer for the departed. It takes five seconds maybe, but you have made a conscious choice to redeem the moment. For he who keeps death before his eyes will never sin,” as Saint Ephraim the Syrian has said. These are just a few fleeting examples of the innumerable opportunities within our lives for us to redeem the time. Within the mundanity of our lives, only our internal awareness of our external circumstances really changes. Chronos happens to us whether we want it to or not, but Kairos requires from us a violent and holy effort, or podvig, to pull our mind back into the present moment where God is waiting. Yet, thankfully our Christian lives are more than just the mundane, for it is also liturgical. It is lived in the mundane, but anchored by the liturgical life. The mundane is where we fight our hidden passions, but the liturgical life is where we receive grace, the tools, and the healing to fight them: prayer, fasting and almsgiving, to name a few. The Mundane is where we find the scattered pieces of our weekly lives, but the liturgical life is where those pieces are put back together. Our mundane lives remind us of our earthly humility and limitations, but the liturgical life keeps us oriented to our heavenly destiny via theosis. As Father Alexander Schmemann once wrote, “the Christian is called to be a priest of creation, turning the world into a liturgy. We step into the church to remember who we are, so that when we return to the mundane world, we can begin to transfigure it.” Prayer, psalms, and thanksgiving are the words and the very language of the Holy, while “what if,” regrets, and other some such language focusing on the passage of time behind and ahead of us remains the language of the Evil One. If we are not watchful, the enemy will trap us in a time that does not exist: the Ghost of yesterday or the anxieties of tomorrow. He seeks to rob us of the only space where God can be found: present moment. When we leave these doors today and step back into the current of Chronos, we are not meant to leave the liturgy behind. We are to become it so that we may begin our work to redeem the world. Every second that passes is a holy crossroad. Every distraction we encounter is a hidden icon of Christ waiting to be revealed to us. Do not fall asleep on the deck of this sinking world, nor allow the shiny billboards of sin to blind you to the shore. By the grace of God let us transfigure the ordinary into the extraordinary, the mundane into the mystical, and our fleeting seconds into eternity. The ship is moving. What are you going to do about it? By the prayers of Thy Most Pure Mother, the Holy and God bearing Fathers, all the Saints, and the martyrs, and the angels have mercy on us and save us. Amen

Excerpt: Prayer, psalms, and thanksgiving are the words and the very language of the Holy, while “what if,” regrets, and other some such language focusing on the passage of time behind and ahead of us remains the language of the Evil One. If we are not watchful, the enemy will trap us in a time that does not exist: the ghost of yesterday or the anxieties of tomorrow. He seeks to rob us of the only space where God can be found: the present moment.

Do not let your past dictate the present moment.

Anathema. Blasphemy. Heresy. Progressive nonsense. They are recreating God in their own broken image. Also, priestesses are Pagan, not Christian. See the fruits of the tree.....

Riding a CBR to work in the morning over a twisty mountain road is better than coffee :D

Saint Cyril, pray for us! youtube.com/watch?v=JPnRxDVu…

Sometimes we are our own worst enemy.

Eight years ago today I was ordained into the Diaconate by His Eminence, Metropolitan Hilarion of blessed memory.

This year is being increasingly difficult. I am hoping at some point, I will hear "That'll do Donkey, that'll do," and I can have a single month without problems XD

Hate is an anchor your heart does not need.

The Apostle's fast completed, so prepared, let us go forth into the world to love and serve the Lord! Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us!

Ok, so downside to uninstalling the social media from your phone, is you cannot make posts when you are out of pocket, so to speak..... Last week on Tuesday, when I walked to my car my blood ox dropped to an 87. I checked when I got there, but I thought it was a fluke. I sat for a moment, caught my breath, and drove to work. Well, when I got to work, after walking form my car to my desk,. I sat down and immediately began vomiting into my trash can. Two hours later I went to the ER because I just did not feel right at all (and my PCP told me to). I was admitted Last Tuesday to the Hospital, and I just got out today. Initial scans were not producing conclusive answers. The results presented as pneumonia (which I had just gotten over), but also as something else? I had a bronchoscopy and an echocardiogram after the CT scan and X-rays. The entire right lung (or most of it) and part of the left lung were both inflamed. Yet, they have not found a conclusive test result as to what or why. Bronchoscopy showed old blood and mucus in my lungs and they rinsed that out and sent it off for testing. So far all tests have been negative. So far their best diagnosis is a mycoplasma that caused a pretty severe case of walking pneumonia. The question we cannot answer is whether this pre-existed my most recent case of pneumonia, or followed after because I did not get all the medications I asked for. | That was the lesser of two main issues..... The left side of my heart is enlarged. This in turn caused a backup of blood and fluid into the lungs. I was essentially slowly drowning. It is likely the Kidney infection exacerbated and kicked this whole thing off, but that is good. LVH can only be detected by Echocardiogram or MRI (to my understanding). This is why it is called the silent killer. Even though the cardiovascular screening /calcium score I had last year said I had a perfectly healthy heart, that only tests the systolic side of things, not the diastolic (again, to the best of my understanding). It took a few days to get the excess water to shed. I lost over 4 liters of fluid yesterday, so it seems this has been building for a while. All in all, I am back home. I am doing well. I am on a water pill that is light on the kidney's to keep the water off my lungs, and have a harsher one to take when needed. I will have to weight myself daily to monitory. I have been put on a maintenance inhaler, which I likely should have had from the beginning for the asthma I was diagnosed with last year. The atypical pneumonia is still a mystery, but here we are. Thank you to all of you that came by to visit, and the plethora of items that were brought by for my comfort and benefit. It really meant a lot to me.

Apologies for the sudden silence after my last post. I've been in the hospital since last Tuesday. Doctors were initially uncertain what was wrong with me based on initial scans. After about a week of testing we finally have a path forward as of yesterday. It seems the left side of my heart is enlarged, causing a backup of blood and fluid into my lungs, this combined with my recent case of pneumonia and kidney infection just kind of snowballed. Things are better now. Tentatively we're shooting for a release day of tomorrow but we shall see. I think everyone for their prayers

Prayers would be appreciated. I am suddenly borderline hypoxic, and any exertion at all pushes me into exertional hypoxia at 88 or less.....

The priest called me father Deacon Bagel at liturgy today. He quickly corrected himself but it was still funny 🙂 I now expect all offerings to include cream cheese. ^_^