“That prayer with which Joachim and Anna asked God for the Blessed Virgin Mary lasted almost 50 years – with patience, with hope, – said Metropolitan Onufriy . – They had already become elderly, and, of course, there are laws of nature, there is a certain age when people can no longer give birth to children. But they… prayed to God, and God listened to their prayer”.

He noted that “from this holy story we learn how to pray.”

“We pray, we ask God for something, and sometimes God gives it to us immediately, or sometimes after a certain period, or at other times we can’t wait and give up praying. Prayer, if we ask God for what is useful for salvation and not for perdition, is always fulfilled by God. But the greater the gift we ask from God, the more patient the prayer should be,” the Primate explained.

According to him, “prayer is spiritual gold; a person today may not have anything worthwhile, but he will pray, and tomorrow he may receive very much.”

“May the Lord help us, give us courage, so that our prayers, which we offer to God, are done with patience and humility. These are the two virtues that make prayer strong. The more a person humbles himself before God, the stronger his prayer is, and the more a person prays patiently, the greater the gift he can ask God for,” His Beatitude noted.

Source: www.spzh.news

For a child, there’s no such thing as bad parents, and for parents—bad children. Our father and mother had nine of us, but the Lord took one of us away from this life during infancy. We had a Christian upbringing and had a very religious mother and grandmother on my mother’s side. However, our father was a Protestant. Although we were born in such a family, all of us were baptized in the Orthodox Church eight days after our birth. Our father never forbade us to go to church, although he himself only prayed the “Our Father” and never made the sign of the cross. He was strict in our upbringing and always said, “One that’s been caned is worth two that haven’t”. We would also remember the following words that he used to say: “I’d rather endure pain once than be ashamed of my children for the rest of my life.”

When I was about sixteen or seventeen years old and was in high school, then, out of interest, I visited some Protestant congregations a few times. I wanted to understand their perception of the faith, what kind of spiritual state they were in, and what they do during their so-called services. But there I saw the absurdity and emptiness of these people. Truly: This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me (Mt. 15:8). If a person pulls out the bricks holding together his house, it will surely fall. The same happens when people abolish the dogmas of the Church, the structure of the services, the Holy Tradition of the Church and the Apostles.