Julie

☦️ | artist | director of comms @allsidesnow | fire dancer 🔥

[Julie @juliewrites]

Adapted from a sermon by Fr. Joshua Makoul, St. George Cathedral, Pittsburgh, PA: https://t.co/x103XdKUne

[Julie @juliewrites]

On saying "yes" to waiting:

Often when a prayer isn't answered immediately, our instinct is to take things into our own hands, to handle it ourselves, to over-function. We act like an abandoned child, instead of one who trusts their parents.

The first step in correcting this is to be truthful. Come clean to God. Remove delusion, denial, and justification. Come clean to God about who you are, what you are, and what your life is.

Accept the reality of who you are and what you've been doing in trying to only engage the areas of your spiritual life that are congruent to your own ego. God will see that.

Then sit back and wait. Wait for God to take the next step. He will step in and parent us.

This is the space of miracles — where there is space for God.

We have to become a people of waiters — do less doing, and more waiting.

Sometimes in order to say no to something, we have to have something else to say yes to. So in order to say no to over-functioning and trying to take care of everything and acting like an abandoned child, we must say no to that, and say yes to just waiting.

Come clean with God. Say this is who I am and this is who I've been pretending not to be. Then we clear the obstacles out of our way.

We are told to be persistent in prayer, and to always bring things before God, but there is a difference between persistent prayer and nagging, and any parent can relate. The child nags because he doubts his parents will take care of it.

Do we pray persistently because we doubt, because we don’t think God is going to do it?

Patience and trust are in short supply in our world today. The shortage of these things leads us to act spiritually like a child who has been abandoned.

So pray persistently, but with trust.

Ask within if you are acting spiritually like a child who’s been abandoned, that at the first sign of having to wait, starts over-functioning.

Pray, then sit back, and wait for God to take the next step.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Carl Jung, this line may contain the most wisdom in the fewest words ever

[Julie @juliewrites]

@amytheartist treating Orthodoxy as a political/cultural/keyboard war instead of a call for his own spiritual transformation

[Julie @juliewrites]

@aftfuture What page of the report is this finding on? I don’t see anything in this report about religious Americans’ confidence or how that is defined.

[Julie @juliewrites]

@allie__voss Yeah, there’s a strong sentiment on the online right/crunchy circles that if you were just a Perfect Person™️ who makes Perfect Choices™️ like them that you’d never have any hardship. They think humans are in ultimate control, but we’re not.

[Aryn Elaine➕ @ElaineAryn]

God cares about timing, not time

[Natty4Theotokos @ladies4pd]

What @Lauren_Southern article exposes intentionally or not is the strange double-bind created by gynocentrism theory itself once it enters online Orthodox discourse.

Because the moment “society is gynocentric” becomes the primary interpretive lens, women stop being viewed as persons struggling toward salvation and instead become symbols of civilisational decline.

Female behaviour becomes over-read, moralised, pathologised, and treated as spiritually representative of the entire culture.

That is why a relatively mild article about awkward Orthodox dating culture was experienced by many Orthobros not as criticism, but as existential attack.

If feminism is understood not merely as an ideology but as the animating force behind societal collapse itself, then any woman voicing frustration becomes 'the enemy.'

Ironically, the revenge porn incident then revealed the exact thing Katherine was trying to describe: a subculture where resentment toward women has become spiritually formative.

And this is where Lauren is actually correct: many of these spaces confuse moral seriousness with humiliation, and isolation with righteousness.

But I also think Lauren misses something important. The #spirituallyhomo & #statusanxiety riddled Orthobro phenomenon did not emerge from nowhere. Many young men genuinely do feel alienated, disposable, relationally confused, spiritually homeless, and suspicious of modern gender ideology.

@Gynocentrism theory gives them a totalising explanation for all of that pain.
The problem is that once grievance becomes *ontological*, repentance disappears.
Everyone becomes trapped in accusation: women become 'degenerate', men become 'incels,' and every interaction becomes civilisational warfare.

What disappears is the Orthodox understanding of the human person as simultaneously fallen, glorious, contradictory, wounded, and capable of repentance.

Orthodoxy does not teach us to flatten reality into 'patriarchy vs feminism,' 'men vs women,' or 'gynocentrism vs misogyny.' It teaches us to see sin first in ourselves.

That’s the real tragedy here: not merely lust, revenge porn, or online cruelty, but that an entire ecosystem now rewards blame over repentance, spectacle over restoration, and ideology over communion.

[Julie @juliewrites]

@MarshalHolliday Lmao. What a world 😆

[Julie @juliewrites]

“Getting angry together is held by too many people as a sign of fellowship, righteousness, and togetherness. Even anger at evil shouldn’t be the core of a community.

We must show/embody the ancient Christian virtue of dispassion. ☦️

It doesn’t matter if you’re right to be mad. It impairs you.

People think they have to keep consuming [online] content because if they don’t, they will miss something and they/their family will be at risk. False watchfulness.

No one on earth who needs your help needs your anger. If I’m depending on you, I need your composure, not your anger.

Do not wait for someone else to be better in order to give up your anger. Your peace of heart is on you.

You are made in God’s image and likeness, so if you’re being “true to yourself,” you’re being like God.

The image of God is one of peace.” 🕊️

- Notes from a talk by Fr. Raphael, Antiochian Village, Sept. 2024

[Julie @juliewrites]

“Getting angry together is held by too many people as a sign of fellowship, righteousness, and togetherness. Even anger at evil shouldn’t be the core of a community.

We must show/embody the ancient Christian virtue of dispassion. ☦️

It doesn’t matter if you’re right to be mad. It impairs you.

People think they have to keep consuming [online] content because if they don’t, they will miss something and they/their family will be at risk. False watchfulness.

No one on earth who needs your help needs your anger. If I’m depending on you, I need your composure, not your anger.

Do not wait for someone else to be better in order to give up your anger. Your peace of heart is on you.

You are made in God’s image and likeness, so if you’re being “true to yourself,” you’re being like God.

The image of God is one of peace.” 🕊️

- Notes from a talk by Fr. Raphael, Antiochian Village, Sept. 2024

[Julie @juliewrites]

@Joseph_Kerr26 @soupcanarchist Political Christians who are not operating from an authentic spiritual core.

[Julie @juliewrites]

@SincereHyp44120 Lmao what? Where did anyone say that?

[Edgar Allen Poe 🇬🇲 @allenakinkunle]

I think it's better to think of yourself as a not-so-good person who tries everyday to do right by people than to think of yourself as a good person who tries not to do wrong. To me, the former is freeing and more compatible with the human condition.

[Julie @juliewrites]

@NonyaBidne94503 @HariSel57511397 I interpreted it to mean they won the culture but that was likely too broad

[Julie @juliewrites]

@LanceVader @HariSel57511397 Agreed. But you can’t simultaneously be disenfranchised and have won culture

[Julie @juliewrites]

@PippaArmpits @HariSel57511397 Lmao what an unserious interpretation of my posts 😆

[Julie @juliewrites]

@DiamondEyesFox I think so.

[Julie @juliewrites]

@DiamondEyesFox Dang 😆

[Julie @juliewrites]

@DiamondEyesFox Thank you! Yeah, dying for some moderation here. The polarization is insane.