Christ is born!
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ!
Today is Tuesday 7 February 2023 and in Ukraine it is already the 349th day of a great full-scale war.
Yesterday and last night were again difficult and very bloody on our Ukrainian land. Our Donbas is on fire again. The enemy is trying to advance in five directions at once, on our Donetsk region and our Luhansk region, unceasingly shelling our peaceful towns and villages. It is strange, but every day we have rocket attacks, and yesterday there were at least six such rocket attacks on the peaceful cities of Ukraine. Our cities in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kherson regions were affected. In Kharkiv Oblast, the city of Vovchansk was affected. The Russians bombed the polyclinic, a large city dispensary, which burned for a long time that night, and the firemen tried to save what could be saved. As a result of shelling in the Dnipropetrovsk region, a pumping station and nine settlements were damaged, nine towns and villages were completely without drinking water. Our Odesa is recovering from a blackout again.
This morning fresh snow fell almost all over Ukraine. The temperature is dropping again in different parts of Ukraine. Points of invincibility are being built in our cities. Our patriarchal foundation "Mudra Sprava” (Wise Matter) opens these heating tents, which are tents of the space of Christian love in different corners of Ukraine. Helping each other, Ukrainians are able to endure.
On this day, we once again mourn the dead and wounded during the last day, but we also want to thank God and the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the fact that we can live and love, love God and neighbour, love our native Motherland and stand up for human dignity, human life on our Ukrainian land. And today we want to repeat again: everyone should know that Ukraine is standing! Ukraine is fighting! Ukraine is praying!
And you and I continue our spiritual reflections on the Christian and universal vocation of man, on what the Lord calling us to do every day, and therefore throughout our whole life, on what must we do, specifically me and you, now and today, in order to fulfill our Christian calling even during this terrible sacrilegious war.
First of all, today I want us to understand that reading about the vocations of the prophets, holy people in the Holy Scriptures, we sometimes think that the word vocation, this special life mission, applies only to certain chosen people. Is the Lord God really calling me, too? Me, an ordinary person? The answer to this question is affirmative: Yes, He is calling! The Lord God remembers everyone. The words that we heard yesterday, spoken by the Lord God to the Prophet Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in your mother's womb I knew you," apply to every person.
Vocation is something that does not happen only by chance, in the life of some selected people or only from time to time. Each person has his vocation, and he must find it, realize it, and understand it. Then he will, as it were, discover the secret about himself, the secret of God's plan for her. Every person has a vocation to life, to eternal joy with God. It is like the beginning and the end of that distance of our human life.
Our life is given to us by God. We didn't appear in this universe by some blind accident, no. We are the fruit of divine design, of His eternal love. He breathes into us, giving us the breath of life, as the Book of Genesis beautifully describes. Therefore, the ultimate goal for which the Lord created each person is for them to love and be loved, and thus become a participant in the eternal, happy, and blessed life of God Himself. God created each person in order to share with them Himself, His eternal happiness.
Therefore, every person is called to this eternal bliss. But to this final, eternal goal, everyone moves on his own path. And this road to the personal realization of one's life task is called the individual and personal vocation of everyone. Today we can say with certainty that a person cannot exist by himself, being isolated from some goal, being isolated from everyone and everything that surrounds him. A person cannot be happy when he does not know in which way to direct his own physical, mental, and even emotional resources.
The life force that the Lord God gave to man needs a certain direction in order to be oriented to it. And only when a person releases from himself the life-giving force that the Creator gave him, then he feels fulfilled. And he will be happy when all these gifts, which the Lord God gave him as seeds, will germinate, blossom, fertilize, and give fruit, result, result. Each person can realize himself only when he responds to the calls that ...
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Ukraine pray!
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† Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church:
• web site ugcc.ua/en
• Facebook / en.ugcc.ua
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