Worth and Hope
“Those who live with a deep-seated sense of shame experience deep feelings of inadequacy, of being bad and not worthy of the love of others or of God. Shame becomes the darkened lens through which we view life. It can become so interwoven with our being, personality, and daily way of thinking that we are not aware of it. Truly shame has the ability to blind us to the love of God and of others in our life.” (Fr. Joshua Makoul)
“… Terry served in the American military in Thailand. He …“had gone through some real traumatic changes”, seeing and experiencing monstrous atrocities, shocking brutality, and true evil…he experienced what he called “a breaking inside and I just checked out”…he concluded that “there was no way that the human existence could be justified….He said that therefore he “threw off all restraints” and “when you do this, pretty soon they come in white jackets and take you away”….they took him to the hospital…mental ward. Their diagnosis was “no hope”…. the psychosis was too deep because I had seen death close to me and that I would never recover”. It was then that he had an experience of Christ which changed his life. The Lord spoke to his heart and said to him, ‘Terry, I know how you feel. I’ve seen everything that human beings have ever done….I want you to understand the difference in our response to that. You’ve decided not to be a human being, and I decided to become one.’ “…the Lord “took my emptied-out shell and flooded me, drowned me, in how He feels towards human beings. It crushed me, it drowned me, and I figured it was probably just a glimpse of how He feels towards human beings, but it was enough to almost kill me just from His passion He has for us His children”. This revelation caused a new diagnosis, and Terry was soon released.” (Fr. Lawrence Farley)
“In Christ, therefore, every man acquires his particularity, his hypostasis, his personhood, precisely because, by being constituted as a being in and through the same relationship which constitutes Christ’s being, he is as unique and unrepeatable and worthy of eternal survival as Christ is by virtue of his being constituted as a being through his filial relationship with the Father, which makes him so unique and so eternally loved as to be an eternally living being.” (Metropolitan John Zizioulas)
“Hope is not wishful thinking. In contrast, in our age, cynicism borders homelessness. Many are skeptical of anything. Most question everything but their own opinions. In this ocean of doubt, some treat our hope in Christ as a wish that we cast into the future like a message-in-a-bottle is thrown into the sea. However, Paul writes a lifesaving message: "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15:13). Our study today will show that our hope in Christ is not an empty wish or a hollow fantasy. It has its basis in faith in the Lord. It is grounded in our relationship to Christ and confirmed and strengthened by the peace and joy that are the fruit of faith.” (Fr. Basil)
“Although I have completely subjected myself to sin and am unworthy of heaven, of earth and of this passing life, even though I am a slave to delights and have disgraced Your image, yet I still do not lose hope in salvation, wretched as I am, for You have made and fashioned me. I place my hope in Your boundless mercy and approach..” (St. Basil the Great)
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