A few days ago, my daughter-in-law asked me about my younger days. I told her, in detail, about my father, about his death, which taught me, early on, to put a distance between myself and all people. My father handed me the responsibility for his household early on. I set out to the working world early on. I got married early on. I became a father early on. Metropolitan George Khodr called me, early on, to study in preparation for the priestly ministry. I was ordained a deacon and then a priest early on\u2026 She asked me, once again: \u201cwould you have wished for something else for yourself?\u201d. I answered her: \u201cI will leave aside my father\u2019s death. Had I had a say in my history, I would have said that what happened to me throughout my entire life is more than I deserve\u201d. Spending life in complaints is a kind of hell. Peace lies in the ingenuity of surrender. It lies in the steadfast awareness that we always live by the grace of God. Am I saying that I am satisfied with myself in everything that happened to me, in all of it? I know myself to be the chief of sinners. However, despite everything I know about myself, I also know that the essence of life is to spend it thanking God that He does not hold back anything from us, not a thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few days ago, my daughter-in-law asked me about my younger days. I told her, in detail, about my father, about his death, which taught me, early on, to put a distance between myself and all people. My father handed me the responsibility for his household early on. I set out to the working world ...<\/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":[2050,2051,1293,1402,1384],"class_list":["post-8786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-grace-of-god","tag-gratitude-in-suffering","tag-orthodox-christian-life","tag-priesthood","tag-surrender-to-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8786","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=8786"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8813,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8786\/revisions\/8813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}