My loving friend Nicolas Nassif, who dwells with God today, had told me, as an advice, that, to invigorate my life, I should leave my place of residence as well as my ministry for a few days a year, for two or three weeks, to another expanse and other faces. This advice has guided me, to this day, for nearly twenty-five years. Every year, when September arrives, I leave for another place. When the idea of my traveling this year presented itself, one of the arguments raised to my face by my daughter-in-law was this advice, that traveling to new expanses and faces will give me this invigorating change. Here, the expanse is new. However, the faces, as I told you, were not all new. There are faces I know from our country who have been expelled by oppression, which is our daily bread, the oppression of politics, of vacuum, and of this painful truth: that for a person to live in his own country, he has to choose between two things, either be a parrot or be mute! Nothing strengthens us, in our land, like the love of friends and the hope in a new tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My loving friend Nicolas Nassif, who dwells with God today, had told me, as an advice, that, to invigorate my life, I should leave my place of residence as well as my ministry for a few days a year, for two or three weeks, to another expanse and other faces. This advice has guided me, ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[343],"tags":[1708,2082,2083,1293,1816],"class_list":["post-8773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-antiochian-church","tag-exile","tag-hope-in-adversity","tag-orthodox-christian-life","tag-persecution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8826,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8773\/revisions\/8826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}