“Gratitude is a virtue which pleases God more than all the other virtues. In response to it, He provides us with all things which we are unable to reach or obtain on our own. God allots His gifts to us according to the measure of gratitude that we show Him. Only those gifts for which we have given thanks to God become truly ours.” Elder Zacharias

Our mistake is that we expect those around us, that is, sick and fallen creatures, to fulfil our innate need for love, which is something that only God can truly satisfy. We are deceived when we expect to receive from men something that God alone can give us. He instilled in us the desire for love, and He alone can satisfy it. We will know Him through love and become like Him through love.

The more we’ve prepared, the more room we’ve made, the more we’ve suffered, the more we’ve loved, the more we’ve cried aloud- wept and lamented without restraint- the more we’ll have received God Himself. Needless to say, all of this remains hidden beneath a cheerful countenance, beneath a smile, beneath the depths of true joy, beneath an entire life that witnesses to God by its tranquility, love and truth, because we know that, no matter what happens, God for us is everything,

Just as the root of the vine ministers and distributes to the branches the enjoyment of its own natural and inherent qualities, so the Only-begotten Word of God imparts to the Saints, as it were, an affinity to His own nature which is that of God the Father, by giving them the Spirit...

For our Lord came for this reason, that He might change and transform and renew and recreate the soul which had been overturned by the passions…mingling with it His own Spirit of divinity… to make new men, anointing them which His own light of knowledge, that He might put in them the new wine which is His Spirit

To speak in the name of Christ means to speak from within the truth that Christ is. It is not to speak from within some theoretical truth or particular point of view, even if doctrinal. Rather, it is to speak from a profound relationship with the Lord Christ, who is the truth, so that our words will convey not only their semantic meaning but become life to those who receive them