I need a swift kick in the pants this morning....

Light of the East said:

I have seen that that God appears to some in dreams and visions and guides and directs their lives.

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The people that God appears to in dreams also have their own crosses to bear. Many people who God visits in this way have had insane demonic attacks before getting any sort of Divine guidance in such a way.

Light of the East said:

Why not, when I was climbing out of Fundamentalist Calvinism Protestantism, direct me to Orthodoxy by means of having me meet someone, or speaking to my heart in a loud and direct voice, or anything to keep me from going where I went?

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Haven't you already encountered Orthodoxy? You have learned about it from us here on this forum. Also you past experiences will really help others. I went through a lot of flakey stuff in the Charismatic movement and had all sorts of false doctrines, but that now lets me communicate Orthodoxy in a better way to those who come from that tradition.

Do you ever talk with an Orthodox priest? I fell into despondency when I was a protestant for about three years, but I have not had that issue since becoming Orthodox. Finding Orthodoxy was exactly like finding the pearl of great price, and I'm still joyful about it.

During my despondency, I was angry at God, but I realized that God allowed me to go through my season of despondency because I needed to be humbled and was full of prelest. Obviously suicide is not the answer, and I would recommend trying to find a priest who is seasoned spiritually in order to try to talk about your struggles. Also realize that the depression and despondency can be demonic. After I realized I was allowing myself to be despondent and the source was primarily exterior to myself, which I am convinced was demonic, I started to fight against it. Once I started to fight against it, it eventually broke. Shortly thereafter I found Orthodoxy, and I am happy as a clam.

Light of the East said:

I don't think God likes me.

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Light I admire your balls for posting this (are we allowed to say balls? No idea but I'll take a chance).

It won't help you but sometimes I feel the same way. I look at other "successful Christians" and I think "how in hell have I managed to backslide so many times? What's wrong with me?". Sometimes I feel like when things are going wrong (and 2017 has been the worst year of my 49 years so far) and I think "God won't you just cut me some slack? Won't you get mad at someone else today for a change?".

Then....eventually....I think about God's patience with me. A bad tempered middle aged foul mouthed sinner who is all too fond of sin and deserves hell and nothing more and I come to some sort of sanity.

We're all broken in different ways but the fact that you post your frustrations and vent shows you care. That caring doesn't come from a heart that is far from cold. It comes from a heart that wants more and isn't getting it.

I can use all the clichés, press into God, seek first, keep running the race...all a load of smartness.

I've had a rough time for the last...O forever really. The other day I really thought about something that Christ was called "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief". That's the Christ we follow who left us an example of learning obedience by what he suffered.

Think about that for a wee while....and see what happens.

Thanks again for posting - you made me feel encouraged because you shared without pretending.

~Dave

DUPL

DUPL

DUPL

And you see the fact that somehow I've posted it 4 times as well means it's even more re-enforced and so must be true.

Dear o dear how do I delete multiple posts...

I'm going through some somewhat different things from you, but this is my paraphrase if the pseudo pep talk that I got from my priest. "The" temptation we have is to give up free will and responsibility for our lives. God continually says, "You choose. Make choices that I can bless and I will do it. Find your own way through the brambles to the narrow path. " The Devil says, "Come over here. I'll be happy to choose for you and put you on a nice orderly path." It is the evil one who wants to control us. God's path is the one of the hard choices... but that doesn't mean that He doesn't like you or that you're damned if you don't get it all right in this world. Repentance is about changing ourselves. Continually. We do the best we can with the knowledge that we have. But we aren't ever stuck. It is a lie to say that we are locked into one course because we committed without full information. This openness is God's grace, not a curse...

SeraTaru said:

And you see the fact that somehow I've posted it 4 times as well means it's even more re-enforced and so must be true.

Dear o dear how do I delete multiple posts...

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Hello and welcome to CF. We are very glad that you've joined us!

The short answer is that you can't. The forum sometimes glitches and does this. Most times we edit our posts down to say

Dupl

And everyone knows what happened and skips past it. If you have any trouble with hanging up loading when you post, try copying your post (so it doesn't get lost if it failed to post) and reload the page to see if it's there. And then sometimes you may just get duplicates anyway.

Only mods and up can delete posts but they are pretty busy and it's better to just edit it down yourself and move forward.

Again, welcome to CF and thanks for sharing your heart!

~Anastasia~ said:

Hello and welcome to CF. We are very glad that you've joined us!

The short answer is that you can't. The forum sometimes glitches and does this. Most times we edit our posts down to say

Dupl

And everyone knows what happened and skips past it. If you have any trouble with hanging up loading when you post, try copying your post (so it doesn't get lost if it failed to post) and reload the page to see if it's there. And then sometimes you may just get duplicates anyway.

Only mods and up can delete posts but they are pretty busy and it's better to just edit it down yourself and move forward.

Again, welcome to CF and thanks for sharing your heart!

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Thanks!

Can you help me understand TAW? Just came across it on these forums and I'd like to understand what it is better. Thanks & Blessings

Ah my dear brother Light.

I can relate somewhat. I have felt that way myself coming to Orthodoxy, though I tended to shake myself out of the worst of it pretty quickly. But that sense of why letting me wander for so long AND MAKE SO MANY MISTAKES - especially the ones that forever altered the course of my life and those of others as well - is something that still rears its head. At least the part that I think I will forever have to repent for those mistakes. It never goes away. Even though I watch as God's plan unfolds and I see great good (eventually) in the lives of some as a result. Others not so much. Will it ever be good for them? I don't know. We have only the promise of all things working together for the good of those who love Him, transforming us into the likeness of Christ.

I've been given some of that flashy kind of stuff along the way. It ain't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes we take God's good gifts and just use them to dig ourselves even deeper holes we later have to climb out of, getting pretty mud-covered in the process. Never wish for what someone else has. It might cost more than you know.

All I can say is that I have eventually learned that not only does God have us in hand - even when we wander, I think - but He knows what He is doing. After all, He DID bring you here. We really have no way of knowing what other choices might have led to. They could have interacted with circumstances to be disastrous to ourselves or others spiritually. Even when it seems they have been disastrous, I have eventually learned that God may be doing things we don't yet see, because it's not finished yet.

We have to learn to trust Him. I know I wandered for years when that was hard, and sometimes I didn't want to go to Church at all, or pray, or even be reminded of God. I wasn't very happy with Him either. But thankfully He never let me go, even then, and truthfully I think I was in too deep to truly walk away. Or maybe not. Maybe I was kept only through His grace. Knowing how stubborn I can be, that's probably more true.

I don't know if I'm helping. All I can really say is that in you I have often seen my own struggles over the years here, and it has touched my heart, and reminded me often to pray for you and your family. I was in some despair over some of the same things you've talked about. And God has really brought good out of much of it, eventually, so that I can trust Him now for the rest of it. But it took time and wasn't easy. And I didn't have Orthodoxy through many of my struggles.

Prayers for you, my brother.

SeraTaru said:

Thanks!

Can you help me understand TAW? Just came across it on these forums and I'd like to understand what it is better. Thanks & Blessings

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TAW is The Ancient Way, which is the subforum for Eastern Orthodoxy.

In short, EO is that part of the Church you read about in Scripture - the Church at Antioch, the Church at Thessolaniki, etc ... all except the Church at Rome - who separated herself from us (after some bumpy centuries of growing apart) and became Catholicism. As you probably know, all the various denominations came out of attempts to reform Catholicism and reform the reformers - in the west. Orthodoxy wasn't part of that. We pretty much existed quietly in the east, often under persecution, just attempting to maintain the faith as it was handed down to the Church by the Apostles. That is one of the major criticisms against Orthodoxy by the west - that we fail to adapt to modern society, but I think it's a strength. That's the history.


Who we are by ethos is much harder to explain, and honestly takes years for a western mind to grasp fully. We are less focused on the legal model on salvation (though that exists) ... but we focus more on being healed from sin and restored/transformed to being like Christ. We don't dissect Scripture and apply scholarly late-century input (though we DO study Scripture), but we are more concerned with how the first Christians understood it (and there are mountains of writings on this that many in the west are never made aware of). But we don't have to understand everything. We accept that some things of God are a mystery, and we are ok with that. There are great intellectuals in our tradition, but our main focus is on cooperating with God's grace and practicing the life of faith rather than putting intellectual study first. We value communion with God and love of neighbor. Community within the body of Christ is very important to us, rather than a focus on each of ourselves as individuals apart from the Body.

There is probably more, but those are the major differences I can think of. I'm not saying the West is devoid of these things, but I am saying that we think very differently concerning them and our focus on them is much more.

I hope this answers your question? You can feel free to start a thread if you like. None if the community forums in CF allow teaching or arguing against the faith group they are set up for, but we do also have a section for that (St. Justin Martyr's which should be visible at the top of our forum). But we always welcome questions or posts in fellowship from anyone.

God be with you!

Light of the East said:

If my eternal salvation or eternal damnation depends entirely upon the choices I make here on earth, why allow me to wander about in spiritual blindness rather than guiding me?

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who says He is not guiding you? St. Paul was a persecutor of the Church, and yet God used what he learned as a Pharisee, his education and status as a Roman citizen, to bring the Gentiles to the Faith. just because He might not seem like He is behind you, doesn't mean He is not there. it just means you can't see Him.

~Anastasia~ said:

TAW is The Ancient Way, which is the subforum for Eastern Orthodoxy.

In short, EO is that part of the Church you read about in Scripture - the Church at Antioch, the Church at Thessolaniki, etc ... all except the Church at Rome - who separated herself from us (after some bumpy centuries of growing apart) and became Catholicism. As you probably know, all the various denominations came out of attempts to reform Catholicism and reform the reformers - in the west. Orthodoxy wasn't part of that. We pretty much existed quietly in the east, often under persecution, just attempting to maintain the faith as it was handed down to the Church by the Apostles. That is one of the major criticisms against Orthodoxy by the west - that we fail to adapt to modern society, but I think it's a strength. That's the history.


Who we are by ethos is much harder to explain, and honestly takes years for a western mind to grasp fully. We are less focused on the legal model on salvation (though that exists) ... but we focus more on being healed from sin and restored/transformed to being like Christ. We don't dissect Scripture and apply scholarly late-century input (though we DO study Scripture), but we are more concerned with how the first Christians understood it (and there are mountains of writings on this that many in the west are never made aware of). But we don't have to understand everything. We accept that some things of God are a mystery, and we are ok with that. There are great intellectuals in our tradition, but our main focus is on cooperating with God's grace and practicing the life of faith rather than putting intellectual study first. We value communion with God and love of neighbor. Community within the body of Christ is very important to us, rather than a focus on each of ourselves as individuals apart from the Body.

There is probably more, but those are the major differences I can think of. I'm not saying the West is devoid of these things, but I am saying that we think very differently concerning them and our focus on them is much more.

I hope this answers your question? You can feel free to start a thread if you like. None if the community forums in CF allow teaching or arguing against the faith group they are set up for, but we do also have a section for that (St. Justin Martyr's which should be visible at the top of our forum). But we always welcome questions or posts in fellowship from anyone.

God be with you!

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Anastasia (great name btw) this is fascinating and hasn't answered my questions at all - only leads me to more questions!!!!

But in a good way of course

If you could recommend a really good book that could open my eyes to this then please share and I'll get it from amazon.

My spiritual journey from an upbringing in the Plymouth Brethern through extreme charismatic heresy and chaos and leaning now towards more traditional but O so wary and sceptical of "the modern church" is always leaving me feeling like something's not right and something's missing. I would like to read more about your beliefs.

Thanks & Blessings
Dave

SeraTaru said:

Anastasia (great name btw) this is fascinating and hasn't answered my questions at all - only leads me to more questions!!!!

But in a good way of course

If you could recommend a really good book that could open my eyes to this then please share and I'll get it from amazon.

My spiritual journey from an upbringing in the Plymouth Brethern through extreme charismatic heresy and chaos and leaning now towards more traditional but O so wary and sceptical of "the modern church" is always leaving me feeling like something's not right and something's missing. I would like to read more about your beliefs.

Thanks & Blessings
Dave

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Will move my reply to your other thread.

I think you're over-thinking a lot. God is mysterious, impossible to understand (if He were comprehensible, how could He be our God and we His creation?!), but He loves us. He loves you, Light, by giving you your friends, your pets, your job, a safe country to live in, and about a thousand other things. I don't get up in the morning trying to go through litanies or praying chotkis or memorizing long prayers to impress the Lord. In fact, I'm so busy in the morning as a teacher trying to get to work and a dad and husband that I pray in the car.

My prayer in the morning starts as a thanksgiving. I thank God for

my wife
my 3 kids
my teaching job
my parents still being alive
my health despite my aches and pains
my pets
my home
my health care
my church parish
my church family
the vacation that is to come at the end of the week
my income
forgiveness the Lord has given
the Eucharist medicine I was given yesterday
HOPE

I thank Him for as many things as I can. I begin with "Oh heavenly king" prayer and "Blessed is our God always now and ever...." etc. Sometimes I do the "Lord have mercy" x 3. Depends.

If I meditate on how inadequate my prayers are in form and duration and eloquence, I will be crushed and broken. I am happy because I know the Lord Jesus Christ loves me, despite my stupidity and manifold sins. God also knows part of the Fall of humanity is MOOD. God isn't governed by moods. He is impassible. We have the unfortunate Fallen side effect of moods. Moods blow us like wind. But God knows that. We as Orthodox Christians try to work past our moods and grow in duty and spiritual routines. Discipline. But occasionally mood sways our souls. We go through a funk. It happens. Dust yourself off, stand up, get back in the race. If the funk stays, go to Confession and lay that at the throne of Christ and ask for infusion of Grace.

Don't overthink how God interacts with you. MOST OF US don't get a Pauline moment of being knocked off our horses, Light. Most of us don't get a Moses Burning Bush experience. I would submit to you that most of us get the Samuel experience of a whisper. God is quiet in voice, LOUD IN BLESSINGS. Have you been blessed by him? Can you not count your blessings? (I don't ask that in a belligerent tone!) and see the mark of God in them? Do you expect a loud parting of the Red Sea or a chariot like Elijah or do you expect a Samuelesque whisper in the night?

Look at Abraham. Sometimes God did not speak to him at all. And when he didn't, Abraham made some poor decisions. Look at how Abraham went down to Egypt, lost Sarah to the pharaoh, felt lost and broken, and God swoops in and saves him. "I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you."

Why are you analyzing God's timing? I spent the first 36 years of my life flailing religiously. I spent my childhood as a kinda-sorta-Catholic who went to Mass about 3-4 times a year AT BEST. I didn't understand the Mass at all. I thought it was torture, boring, and pointless. In high school I was swept away, captivated by Eastern religions. I considered myself a Buddhist for about 5-6 years. On the SAT test, I listed my religion as "Buddhist." I traveled to Thailand and China and Hong Kong. I visited Buddhist monasteries looking for truth. I studied and studied Buddhism reading everything from Christmas Humphries to Walpola Rahula, DT Suzuki, and John Bloefeld. I read thousands of pages. I was convinced that Buddhism was truth. Then I felt the Holy Spirit one day in junior college. I couldn't explain this feeling. I went back to the Catholic Church. I grabbed my old kids' bible, started with Genesis, read the whole thing. I prayed for the first time instead of meditated.

Catholicism seemed off to me after reading Scripture, so I went to the Anglican Church. For the next 15 years I went back and forth between the two with the occasional visit to the Lutherans, etc. As I researched the Fathers, I realized the Catholics were exceptionally MUFFED-UP. Then the Anglicans were not an acceptable alternative. Equally flawed in other ways. It was not until I picked up a book in Chinatown, San Francisco, in a Catholic bookstore next to Old St. Mary's cathedral called "The Primacy of Peter" by an Orthodox priest Father John Meyendorff, that I had my eyes properly opened.

So from 1975 to 2011 I was not Orthodox. God saw fit to open my eyes in 2011. Fine. Do I wish I had been illumined in 1975? Uh, yes and no. God's will was otherwise. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, it all prepared me for the One Faith. I understand a great deal about world religions and the important nuances between denominations and sectors of Christianity as an adult. I'm well-equipped to evangelize, help, guide, and explain the faith if need be.

St. Augustine was an atheist, a Manichee, a Neo-Platonist, and quite the hedonist most of his young life.....then.....Orthodoxy. His early life outside of the Church prepared him for a strong background in rhetoric, philosophy, debate, and theology. Imagine if he had been a cradle Orthodox? The same is true of other saints.

Maybe God is whispering you. Maybe your life up to this point has been a preparation for something special! Maybe you haven't heard Him when He spoke to you. Sometimes the dialogue we want with God is a monologue and we won't let Him speak. I know that from personal experience! Click on each one of these links below. They're SUPER SHORT. See if you can see a common "s" word in them! We all need to see this "s" word in how God deals with us. We live not in the age of sight, but in the age of FAITH. The apostles saw Christ. They lived with Him. They spoke to Him. They witnessed His miracles. They fasted, ate with, listened to, and knew Him closely. But they were also martyred (mostly) and lived hard, demanding, harsh, exhausting lives. We live in an age of relative comfort and ease, but an age of faith. God speaks to us now like the little child Samuel, not like Moses.

Don't rip on yourself for your prayers not being long, elaborate, eloquent, and flowery. Don't rip on God for His timing with your conversion or struggles. Don't rip on anyone. You are where you are. God loves you. Make the faith simpler. Get back to squares. Just speak to Him. Pray. Read. Keep coming here. Visit a Divine Liturgy. Just love Christ. He has a plan for you. Trust Him.

Isaiah 7:11
1 Samuel 2:34
2 Kings 19:29
Isaiah 37:30
Isaiah 38:7
Jeremiah 44:29
Luke 2:12

Light of the East said:

from any of you who would like to straighten me out.

Bottom line: I try to do the Morning Hours every morning. This morning, I picked up my prayer book and Bible and after sitting for a few minutes, put them down and walked away. My heart is just not in it....so why bother. To put on a show or make myself feel better?

I am upset with God this morning and quite frankly, in a mood that if He came to me in person this morning, I would turn my back and walk away.

I am going to vent this morning with no holding back. Feel free to kick me in the pants verbally after I am done.

What kind of "love" is it to me to allow me to wander about my life, making all the mistakes I made, some of them quite horrendous, when I was in need of the truth? I have seen that that God appears to some in dreams and visions and guides and directs their lives. Me......meeaaah, not so much (like, not at all!)

Why not, when I was climbing out of Fundamentalist Calvinism Protestantism, direct me to Orthodoxy by means of having me meet someone, or speaking to my heart in a loud and direct voice, or anything to keep me from going where I went?

If my eternal salvation or eternal damnation depends entirely upon the choices I make here on earth, why allow me to wander about in spiritual blindness rather than guiding me? Why allow heretics and heresy to flourish if they send people to eternal torment? Well, there is one answer perhaps, and that is that I am deceiving myself into thinking that I am some kind of really good, honest soul who wants the truth when in fact, in the deepest recesses of my heart, I do not. That knowledge is even more terrifying to me.

Which means that I might as well give up this vain chase of a deity who wants nothing to do with me personally ("Is Jaaaaazuz your personal Lord and Savior???") and go back to sin because I am going to hell anyway.

Friendship to me means that someone cares enough about me to stop me dead in my tracks when I am about to make a wrong choice, even if it means taking me by the shoulders and screaming in my face. Friendship means being there in my pain, not letting me constantly suffer.

I don't think God likes me.

That's how I am feeling this morning. It's ugly and I am sad and in a lot of inner pain. Honestly, this is one of those mornings I get every so often that if I wasn't terrified of sending myself right to hell I would find a gun and ... BANG!!!!!

I'll get over it. Somehow I have gotten over it before and I'll slog on in this life, hoping that at the end there is enough mercy in God to let me be the doormat to heaven.

(I sat here 10 minutes wondering if I should erase this self-centered pity party or post it. I think I'll post it, if for no other reason than to hope that some of you might pray for me and maybe Jesus will listen to your prayers. I feel that He has little regard for mine).

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may the dialogue continue and bear good fruit!

We might be kindred spirits. When I was in my first phase of student teaching, my master teacher was my actual third grade teacher from when I was 8-9 years old! I was so stoked at the thought of teaching with my old teacher from back in the day!!! Well, things went pretty well for a while, until I was given an assignment from the credential program. This one requirement on my competencies list was for me to teach a guided reading group using Rigby Readers and running records in Fountas and Pinnell format. This teacher did small groups, but she was old-school. No guided reading. No leveled reader books. No F&P methodologies. She did her own thing. When she and I were meeting, I asked her if I could take a small group. She said yes very positively. Then I asked her if I could bring in some leveled readers since she didn't do guided reading FP style. She BLEW A GASKET and screamed in my face like a lunatic! She came off with the "HOW DARE YOU!" stuff about how dare I claim she doesn't teach reading!? I tried and tried to tell her that that was NOT what I said! She just couldn't get it. She hated F&P evidently and thought I was some son of a gun for asking. It wasn't my idea! It was a requirement! She demanded an apology and threatened to boot me. It was traumatizing and awful. It took a couple weeks to get us back on track. That was initial student teaching.

My second student teaching was a real hoot. I was placed at a low-performing school. The teacher would come back from lunch 10 minutes late. I had no key to the classroom as the student teacher, so the kids and I stood out there on the blacktop. She would emerge with her giant Pepsi and purse in her arms, open the door. She apparently thought me being there to watch her kids gave her an extra 10 minutes. One time it was 15. Anyway, that same teacher was supposed to let me teach a science lesson as part of my competencies. She didn't. I asked her about doing it the next day. She penciled it into her plans. Then the next day came, and she changed her mind. She did this all week long. When I asked her, she would see it as nagging her. Then I saw how chaotic and insane her math lessons were. She didn't teach. She'd throw Math Land manipulative plastic teddy bears at the kids and they'd "free flow explore" which is impressive jargon for "mess around and play with" the bears. I asked her if I could do a structured math lesson. That bugged her. Then I needed to do an art project. She said the materials I needed were in her cabinet. I got in there. What I saw was yarn, crayons, staples, glitter, paper, pipe cleaners mixed with glue and goops and slime in a massive pile. Touch one crayon and the whole cabinet fell onto the floor.

She finally got fed up with me asking for time to do what she was supposed to let me do, and didn't like me seeing her mess and her NON-teaching. She realized I was watching her NOT do her job, and when I tried to meet standards, she saw it as a challenge. I got a phone call about 10 days into it at night. It was my credential supervisor. He said, "never have I had a student teacher KICKED OUT of a school!! The principal at the school said you were harrassing the teacher and causing her distress. They said you may never darken the doors of that school again."

Long story short, I was allowed to be MY OWN MASTER TEACHER when I got hired on an emergency credential months later. I never finished the actual program, finished it on my own terms.

But the point I'm trying to make is that I was accused twice of things I never did. Wrong place at the wrong time.

Twenty years later I'm the veteran at my school and I have higher test scores than anyone and have hordes of junior high, high school, and college kids coming back to see me and have so much love and appreciation from kids and parents.

My first 7-8 years of teaching were sheer HELL. I only surprised by God's grace.

If you wanted to be an Eastern Catholic priest, could it be possible God made sure that WOULDN'T HAPPEN so that you could eventually be an ORTHODOX PRIEST!? Stranger things have happened, brother!

Light of the East said:

Your post was spot on. I'm pretty much over my morning hissy fit. I'll plod on. What else can I do? Where else do I go?

As for visiting a Divine Liturgy, I think that's what set this whole thing off for me. I went back to Pennsylvania to see my grown up children and my newest grandson. While I was there, I went to Christ the Savior OCA on Sunday to see my old friends from the Ruthenian parish we used to attend together. Oh, it was sooooooo nice to see them. The Liturgy was AMAZING!!! They have a choir of about 12 or so and they not only sounded like 50, they really matched the pace of the tones to the proper time in the Liturgy.

But what I think set me off was this. I found out that not only did the friends I knew from St. Ann's BCC convert, there have been several others. And four of them are being ordained this Sunday. If you know anything of my story, you know that any time I hear of someone being ordained, it is a deep pain in my heart that will not go away. I was tossed out of seminary after I complained about a priest who really should be in the Latin church and is doing things that violate liturgicon, such as coming to the side altar with a handful of bread cubes, dressed in his "civies" (not even an epichatraleon!), tossing the cubes on the discos, making the sign of the cross over them with his hand held in Latin fashion, and leaving!!!! That was his version of proskemedia!!!!!!

I
WAS
SCANDALIZED.

But instead of disciplining this priest, the bishop chose to relieve me of my opportunity to become a deacon after I complained. I keep trying to get over it, but it still sticks in my craw and it HURTS!!! I think that is what got me going yesterday.

And yes, I was pouting....I'll admit that. I want what I want, which is the foundation of pride, as if I am someone special in the economia of the Kingdom of God.

And I am still frustrated by the roadblocks in the way of my converting. When my wife found out that I went to an Orthodox Liturgy yesterday, first she tells me that I am in "mortal sin," then gets all crazy about not being in submission to the Pope of Rome. She is a cultural Catholic, i.e., she is very devout to what she knows, which in a nutshell is that Rome is the Church and no one else is. What she knows about Christianity, its history, the Orthodox Church, etc., you could fit in a thimble and have room for a Mack truck. It will take a miracle from God for my conversion not to result in a large area of scorched earth around me, both with her and with my current parish. And I don't want to hurt people. I just want the truth once given to the Apostles and Rome does not have it. Period.

So anyway, I'm better, but I'm still kind of blue around the edges right now. I do thank all who responded and I do covet your prayers.

BTW - I spoke with the parish priest at my friends' OCA parish. I think he is willing to help me via Email to sort through all this. A wonderful priest, married, with four children.

As my one friend, Denny, said to me yesterday during the Liturgy, "This is a slice of heaven."

I couldn't have agreed more. They are sooooooo blessed. I hope I can find a similarly good parish down here.

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