Archives for 2016

The word “defending” in greek means that I’m lifting a shield over your head and protecting you from the attacks of the enemies. The shield was a defensive weapon that could cover all parts of the body and its value was great because it could move and protect the part of the body that needed protection.

For this reason, the word “defending” has multiple meanings and refers to any kind of attack, regardless of the opponent’s goal. Many times, man is equipped but cannot be completely safe because no one knows exactly the plans of his opponents. As a result, unexpected blows have to be covered with a weapon, and that’s exactly what the shield’s role is, because it could be moved directly to every part of the body that was attacked.

We can all understand that this flexibility was and is valuable because it can offer strong protection at every strike and keep the person who is attacked by their enemy safe and unscathed. Of course, since we do not live in conditions of physical war, the concept of protection is more valuable because the attacks and the need for defense are many and generally unknown, since the enemy has a rich arsenal and a variety of methods in its attacks.

We all understand or at least suspect that God’s gifts are significant and unique, and because of that, for unexplainable reasons, we consider that these gifts are addressed only to specialists, and only those who know much and enjoy glory and admiration in their daily lives. We also think that ordinary and everyday people do not have a share in knowledge and experience, so they are excluded from these issues and we consider it a natural state that they have to be dependent on the opinion of others.

This is obviously an erroneous and pretentious picture of God’s gifts, even if it is taken into account that nowadays, simple people manage huge issues involving millions of people and their everyday lives, from car drivers to professionals who care for our everyday life.

While we – the ordinary people – are managing big issues of our lives, when it comes to the management of God’s gifts, for unexplainable reasons, we think it is an issue that does not concern us, an issue that we cannot have knowledge of and of course we cannot manage it. And that is obviously wrong and even fatal.

Our everyday life is full or repetitions, habits, familiar issues that fill our days and nights many times. And we would all like to abolish some of these habits, or at least to apply them rarely and on a case-by-case basis.

This daily routine and these habits often lead to stagnation, pessimism, apathy, fall and not resurrection and revitalization, even in our bodies, much more in our inner world. Long-term stagnation leads to a change in our nature and in our character, to the extent that we are driving ourselves doubtfully into our future.

And we all know that the only solution in this case is a sudden incident that will take us out of stagnation, an event that will renew our interests, even our everyday life. A renewal of interests, a course of new quests and challenges, always brings new winds into our lives and makes us active, efficient, productive and ultimately makes us new people, with new ideas and new habits that lead us safely into a better future. That is precisely the role of God. To renew our interests and lead us, from our routine to the discovery of a new world; the world of faith, that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and it benefits both today and the future.

Quite often we find ourselves in dead ends. Practical dead ends in our work, psychological dead ends in our environment, economical dead ends and so on.

The more the dead ends, the more difficult our lives become every day. And these dead ends, this work without results, is covered and removed by a revitalization of our minds, a new wind that helps us get away from the past and look for a new future.

It’s a practical revitalization and not a theoretical one. Revitalization in our ideas, replenishment of our energy, refreshment and renewal of our interests, our relationships, our goals and our motivations. Nature itself teaches that everything needs to be renewed. From the cells of our body that are renewed daily as we live to the trees and animals, everything is renewed, everything changes every day, even when we cannot observe the change.

Renewal is synonymous with life, movement, search and new things. A life of faith invites us to this renewal. Not to repetition, but to renewal. Not to habit, but to inventiveness and innovation.  Non-renewal means dead ends, it means death. And this must be avoided with all our might, no matter the sacrifices.