It is well known that every effort and every good work is first tried by temptations and grief. This is one of the laws of our Faith. As if each one of our acts, offered to us by God, clean and intact, should be tried from the “sieve” of God’s will before it returns to Him from whom it sprang and originated.
“Yours from yours” stands for all our acts and opportunities which are offered by God daily, because absolutely nothing belongs to us.
Likewise in this period that my country is on a trial and the personal pain of each person has started becoming massive and taking inter-social dimensions, here, on the other corner of the earth, our pain and anxiety is put into trial too. This is also the pain and anxiety of our fellow citizens, fathers, brothers and friends from Greece. Our pain and your pain, since the Greeks always “build” everything collectively in this “blessed refuge” called Greece, as the memorable Fotis Kontoglou would say.
Despite the numerous financial difficulties, the construction of the orphanage is still in process, which is initially supported by the generous donation of 50,000€ coming from a compatriot from Thessaloniki through the Orthodox Missionary Fraternity. In the building installations there will also be included an internal Holy Church for the inmates of the orphanage of our country, a dining room and plenty of rooms where will find board and lodging and a chance to survive those children who were not privileged enough to feel family cosiness or the warmth of a parental hug, which many of us were lucky enough to enjoy in our life by divine grace.
Now that I am writing these lines, I can’t help thinking how important are some things in our life. How lavishly they are given to us by God again and again and how ungrateful and thankless we seem to be towards “Divine Providence’. I am praying to God to put an end to this appalling fever of ingratitude.
I myself wonder at this work, which of course is not mine; first it belongs to God and then to all the people who contribute to that, with the Bishop of our local Church ahead. And yet, I confess that I still hesitate and refuse to admit this miracle. Thoughts of disbelief succeed the blessed moments of Divine consolation, which, I think, we all experience in this full of hardships life.
However, the final result is what I see, live and experience. The church is being built by Divine Grace and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”.
I address these words to all of us as a last warm prayer and plea:
“Confirm, o Lord, the Church, which you purchased with your precious blood”, whether that called Bishop, or volunteers or faithful and crew and Church and Arc of Salvation and in general, consolation to human pain.
Confirm o Lord and forsake not “the works of Thine hands”. Amen
Hieromonk Polykarpos of Hagia Anna
