Confess, take communion, and do not be afraid. Confession is the key to the kingdom of heaven. In times of disease and sorrow, go to church. It is our mental and physical therapist. Confess and take communion more often. Do not judge anyone, kiss your cross in the morning and evening, and everything will pass: illnesses, obsessions, and foolish and perverted thoughts.
Normalize buying land with your siblings and closest friends and building a place where your families can grow together.
Modern isolation isn't how people were meant to live. A few generations ago, extended families often lived just down the road from one another. Meals were shared, support was always nearby, and childcare wasn't a constant concern.
Bring back the village.
“God abandons no one. For Him all are children. None are stepchildren. And the hard occasions and situations - all is sent for our benefit.”
- St. Theophan the Recluse
"It is futile, in fact it is precisely absurd, to speak of reforming society, of changing the path of history, of emerging into an age beyond absurdity, if we have not Christ in our hearts; and if we do have Christ in our hearts, nothing else matters." ☦️ Fr. Seraphim Rose
“What precisely is the meaning of this life? It is to be prepared for our homeland, for Heaven… This present life is not for us to have a good time. On the contrary, it is meant for us to be tested and to pass over into the future, eternal life."
— St. Paisios the Athonite
Elder Justin Parvu taught on the end times:
“The time will come, and it has already come, when the Christian will no longer be persecuted for prayer, but for his refusal to deny himself. Do not be deceived: the apocalypse does not arrive with frightful thunder, but with a cunning silence. Men will be enslaved unchained, controlled unknowingly and instructed to love convenience more than Truth. Peace will be demanded at any cost, but the price will be the soul. Blind obedience will be required, but not to God, but to spirits foreign to Christ. So, anyone who remains firm in their faith in Christ will be considered crazy, extremist, dangerous. Know this: it is not technology that makes the world lose, but the denial of God. It is not the mark on the hand that is more frightening, but the mark in the heart, when man stops fearing sin. When you stop confessing, when you stop crying about your mistakes, when you get accustomed to evil as something natural, that's where the end begins. Churches can stand, but if conscience collapses, nothing remains. There won’t be time for halves or quarters. It will be: either with Christ or without Him. Either cross or rejection. Whoever wants to preserve this life at any cost will lose it, and whoever will suffer for the Truth at risk of losing earthly life, this will be written in Heaven. Don't be afraid of what people are going to do with your body; be afraid of the moment when you will be tempted to keep quiet when you have to confess the Truth. That's where the great battle will take place.”
One man complained to an old man that he was tired of life and could not manage to do anything because of work. The old man answered him: — "A river flows past your house, through which sunlight streams. It is reflected even in your windows. Why don't you notice what a beautiful place you live in?"
The man replied: — "Father, you know, I never think about it, even though I've lived here for a long time. My wife and I are very tired after work, and in the evenings we just drink coffee in the kitchen..."
The old man asked: — "Why do you talk about your problems by the garbage bin in the kitchen? You could climb up that hill and admire the beauty of God's world together!"
We live in paradise, but we make our lives a hell because we only notice the bad things around us.
There was a demographic problem 2,200 years ago, and Polybius wrote exactly what caused it. Read carefully:
"In our times, Greece as a whole is experiencing a lack of children and, more generally, a decrease in population. Because of this, cities have become deserted and there is a lack of productivity, even though we do not suffer from constant wars or epidemics. So if someone advised that we send priests to the gods to ask them what we should say or do to become more numerous and better inhabit our cities, he would not seem foolish, since the cause is obvious and the solution lies in our own hands.
People have turned to arrogance, greed, and laziness, and they neither want to marry, nor, if they do marry, to raise their children. Instead, they have only one or two children with difficulty, just to leave them wealth and raise them in luxury.
This evil grew rapidly, and we did not notice. For when there are only one or two children, and one is lost to war and the other to illness, it is obvious that the cities will inevitably become deserted, just as a beehive weakens little by little, so too do cities that lack population become unable to survive."
Source: Histories, Polybius, 36 (ΛΣΤ)
The similarities after 2,200 years.
People prefer partying, doing drugs, and living for today rather than having a purpose, building a family, and leaving a positive footprint in this world. They choose the easy life. At this point, it’s a form of natural selection between those who are worthy and those who are not to continue.
"A nation that kills its children is not worthy of great happiness, great victories, unity, and salvation. Abortion must be understood as a great sin, and we must all understand the simple truth that the embryo is a human being."
- Patriarch Shio of Georgia
The Spilled Blood of the Holy New Martyrs of Russia: A Century of Faith and Persecution.
There are not enough pages or tears to describe all that the Slavic land has endured so recently, just yesterday. This is but a drop in the ocean of the spilled blood of the holy new martyrs.
Hundreds of thousands of priests and laity killed and torn to pieces for their faithfulness to Christ. More than 2,000 confessors alone have been canonized, and how many more are known to God alone?
And this wasn't some kind of fight against a political enemy. This was hell itself, unleashed. Because only demons who know no depth to their evil can torment people like this.
The scale, power, and ruthlessness of the Soviet persecution of the Church are summed up in a single figure: of the 80,000 churches and monasteries of the early 20th century, by 1939, barely a hundred parishes remained across the vast Russian territory. Not a single monastery, not a single seminary, not a single free bishop, just a scattered handful of monks...
Do you know a greater miracle than the Church's resurrection after this hell? Do you know a greater miracle than what is happening right now, before our eyes: the resurrection of a Church razed almost to the ground, the multiplication of believers, thousands of churches once again, hundreds of bishops, monasteries growing across the land, monks flocking to them once again? My generation will never see a greater miracle!
Our fathers, 40 years ago, laughed and didn’t believe it when they were told that this would happen.
But this was only possible through the blood of the new martyrs.
They gave their lives, often in horrific agony, so that the Church would survive. So that we could receive communion today, come to know God, or simply live in beautiful Russia. Because Russia exists only as long as the Russian Church exists. This means that everyone living in Russia and Russia—people of absolutely every faith and viewpoint—is indebted to the new martyrs.
Orthodoxy exist and is stronger in the Slavic nations today because they went to the cross for us.
Yet their sacrifice and heroism remain unrecognized and, indeed, barely known.
There is no common monument to the new martyrs (unlike their executioners) in Russia.
🔸 Metropolitan Augoustinos Kantiotes of Florina on the Dragon of our Days 🐉🗡️🔸
“One more thing I want to tell you, and I’ll stop. We saw the fearsome dragon which was at the spring, and did not allow anyone to refresh themselves. But besides that dragon, which St. George killed with his spear and with the Cross, in our days first and foremost, another dragon appears much worse than that dragon which St. George killed. And that worse dragon, which chokes all of mankind and endangers with the greatest destruction, is atheism, godless materialism. With this dragon, we must struggle heroically, to not fall into its mouth.”
"Those who do not believe in miracles deny that God can reveal Himself to the world, because a miracle is nothing more than the revelation of God in the world." - St Nectarios of Aegina