It is known to all that every effort and every good work is first and foremost tested by temptations and sorrows. This is also a law of our Faith. As if, therefore, every act of ours should be tested by the “sieve” of the Divine will, so that pure and clean as it is offered by God to us, it may return again to Him from whom it came and proceeded.
“All things considered” therefore applies to all our actions and possibilities that are daily offered from above. For nothing is ever ours.
So now, in this period when our country is being tested and when the personal pain of each person has begun to become collective and to take on inter-social dimensions, here on the other side of the world our own pain and anguish is also being tested, which in turn are the anguish and pain of our compatriots, our fathers, our brothers, our friends from Greece. Our pain and yours, since collectively we Greeks are always building what we are building, in this ‘blessed shelter’, as the immortal Fotis Kontoglou would say, which is called Greece.
Despite all the financial difficulties that are now insurmountable, the construction of the orphanage in the capital of the country continues, which is based on the generous donation of 50.000 € from our fellow patroness from Thessaloniki through the Brotherhood of Orthodox Foreign Missionaries. The building facilities will also include an interior church for the service of the orphans in our country. A prayer room and several rooms where these children, who have not had the chance to experience the family warmth and the warmth of a mother’s or father’s embrace that many of us, by God’s grace, have enjoyed in our lives, will find shelter and a place to live.
… I think now as the pen rolls across this page, how important certain things are in our lives. How lavishly they are given to us by God many times, and how ungrateful and ungrateful we seem to be over this fact called Divine Providence. And I pray that the Lord will put an end to this horrible fever of our ignorance.
So it is with admiration that I too see this work, which of course is not mine but primarily God’s and then the people who contribute to it, with the Bishop of our local Church leading the way. And yet, I confess that I still hesitate and refuse to confess the Miracle. Accounts of disbelief succeed the blessed moments of divine comfort and presence that I think we all experience in this miserable life.
But the final result is what I see. And what I live and experience. The church is built by the grace of God and “the gates of heaven shall not prevail against it”.
Glory therefore to the Thee in all things. Fervent prayer and supplication of us all, I fervently beseech and appeal to all, let his words be his:
“Establish, O Lord, the Church which I build in your glorious Blood”. Whether she is called Bishop, or volunteers, or faithful and full and Temple and Ark of Salvation and comfort in general in human suffering.
Be still, O Lord, and “the works of thy hands be not thine”. Amen.
With the love of Christ,
π. Polycarp Agiannanitis
