Metropolitan Anthony (Pakanich) dwells on the important things to do during the Nativity Fast 2020 – 2021.
What is our life filled with? Usually it is work, leisure and everyday routine. We relax, flipping through the news feed and watching meaningless TV shows. Doing so, we steal from ourselves our own lives, that short time on Earth that is given to us for something else.
Isn’t it enough to just run our eyes across the main points in text without burying ourselves in it? We should not allow ourselves to be drawn into this funnel of contradictory, unverified, mostly unnecessary information, which consumes our vital energy, leaving us nothing but weariness and making us promiscuous and, as a result, defenceless. Ironically, we seem to be willingly opening the gates of our “fortresses” to all these things that are directed, in fact, against us.
What should we do instead? Let us replace the news with live communication and call someone whose face we have already forgotten. Let us rush into someone’s dull everyday life like a warm wind bringing hope and faith on a chilly winter day. I am sure that we will find joy and energy where we never expected.
Let us try to stop being mechanisms and become personalities in the true sense of the word by showing a genuine interest in someone. Let us force ourselves and do it as an experiment.
At least we will have an experience, which, perhaps, we would want to return to.
Let us sow good, hoping that, perhaps, it will sprout in our garden.
Maybe pulling ourselves out of that routine, we can gradually learn to distinguish between a spring and a swamp. Maybe that will help us stop being so gullible and begin to distinguish between truth and false.
Why don’t we try to look to the sky, not at our feet? There are stars and constellations there, looking especially bright on a frosty night.
The Nativity of Christ is a holiday of the heart. In order for a holiday to be a holiday, we need to prepare for it.
Our heart can become either a wonderfully-lit home, ready to accept the King of Kings, or a broken, crooked shack, which even drafts stay away from.
Do not be burdened with life, try to comprehend it, look for meaning in everything, and you will be sure to find it.
Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
Source: https://pravlife.org/ru/content/mitr-antoniy-pakanich-rozhdestvenskiy-post-vremya-peremen
