Today’s Trials Make Us Free

Metropolitan Anthony (Pakanich) spoke on the correct attitude towards trials.

It is difficult to remain calm in today’s situation: everywhere people hear that the danger is increasing. However, if there is no peace in one’s soul, there will be no God in it either. If there is no peace, no trust, there will be no love either.

Any trials make us stronger, wiser, and, most importantly, freer. Other challenges will take place of the current ones. We should not spend all our strength and nerves on what is happening, we will need them in the future. But we will become freer under one condition: if we surrender ourselves to slavery to Christ.

Politicians, psychologists, the media, doctors, well-known speakers, and financiers try to dominate us, but we should not allow any of them to take hold of our soul. Our soul belongs to God.

The voluntary surrender of oneself into the hands of God is the path to freedom.

True love frees a person from fear and fetters, from complexes, distortions and flaws. It contains the Divine impulse. It is active and forces the one to whom it is addressed to act. Love requires perfecting its subject. And this is a real miracle. A person who is truly loved aims to become better, that is, he strives for perfection and can reach the maximum that is indicated to him from above.

Now we transfer this algorithm to our relationship with God. A person who allows God to love himself is gradually freed from sins, transformed by the power of the Divine love. He is doomed to happiness, joy, doomed to be a winner in any battles and circumstances.

With His active and perfect love, God leads everyone to the horizons and peaks that only this person can reach and embrace.

The Lord has His own fullness of love for all. He touches the soul with the brink of His all-perfect and multifaceted love, breathing life, inspiring and nourishing this particular soul.

Today the Lord has given us a great honor: to answer His love.

To answer with love that is weak, imperfect, feeble, uncertain, but addressed to Him.

Everything passes. These times, these strange events, will also pass. They will give way to others. Believers are required to develop immunity to trials for self-preservation. You should look at everything that happens from afar, without being absorbed in it and without exhausting yourself and your loved ones, you should calmly fulfill the necessary requirements, but keep God in your heart.

If He is the center of our life, our reality, meaning, we will go through any dangers. Everything will concern us insofar as it will not take any influence on and power over us.

This was the way that ascetics, hermits and saints lived. Complete immersion in God, departure into the Divine depth into which nothing evil and sinful can penetrate. The depth that gives freedom.

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