words of blessing and encouragement from Orthodox Priests, Monastics and laypeople that I have set aside over decades. I hope they will be as encouraging and uplifting to you as they are to me.
Our thoughts determine our whole life. If our thoughts are destructive, we will have no peace, if they are quiet meek and simple, our life will be the same, and we will have peace within us. It will radiate from us and influence all beings around us – rational being, animals and even plants.
Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives
“Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek, and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility.”
Why does the Lord command us to love our enemies and to pray for them? Not for their sake, but for ours! For as long as we bear grudges, as long as we dwell on how someone offended us, we will have no peace.
Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives
Our starting point is always wrong. Instead of beginning with ourselves, we always want to change others first and ourselves last. If everyone were to begin first with themselves , then there would be peace all around!
Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives
“…starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change”
Michael Jackson Man in the Mirror
“it is important to know that the Church considers
the psalms to be an essential spiritual food
for the Lenten season”
Great Lent: A School of Repentance Its Meaning for Orthodox Christians
“…no soul can exist without God, without His Son,
without His Spirit. God is my being, my breath,
my light, my strength, my drink, my food.
He carries me as a mother
carries her infant in her arms.
More than this. Carrying me, my soul and body,
He dwells in me, and is united to me.”
My Life in Christ
This post is dedicated to Libby, a wonderful woman who has
been inspiring and organizing the Psalter Prayer Group
with an amazing group of women, for the last ten some years.
Wishing everyone a blessed and spiritually profitable Lent!
First Century on Love
Saint Issac of Syria
“One word of a humble and [spiritually] experienced man that is painfully born from the depths of his heart has greater worth than a bunch of clever sayings of an external man’s that come out quickly from his educated mouth. His words don’t speak truth to the souls of men, for they are fleshy words and not the fire of the flames of Pentecost.”
Saint Paisios
from the book : The Monk of Mount Athos
Archimandrite Sophrony
gladsomelife.com 