God is not paid with money!

"God is not paid with money"

A Christian woman who was close to Rev. Simon and who had enjoyed many blessings from him testifies about the case of her daughter, whose doctors at the "Aglaia Kyriaku" Paediatric Hospital were waiting for her end from one hour to the next, and who recovered and got better quickly. Her mother had asked her to take her daughter to the hospital first and then home. In addition, she had promised to sell a piece of land she had as dowry and give the money to the monastery. But when she took the child to the Abbot and asked him all this, he said:

- What are these words? God is not paid with money. It is to love people, not to keep hatred in your heart, not to care what the person next to you is doing, and to help when you see someone suffering. And when people will understand what is the true doctrine, they will be saved, and if not, they will be lost.
And the mother asked him:

- And what is the medicine, Father?

And the Abbot answered:

- Holy Communion and Holy Confession and repentance, my daughter. The day will come when you will have no place to bury the dead of misfortune and disease, and will bury them in mass graves. This is where man has come by sin. He's forgotten God, he's forgotten the fast. He no longer takes heed to anything holy...
The same person was once told by the Abbot that such a famine will come, compared to which the war famine (1941) is nothing. The lady asked him if there was going to be war, and he replied, "More of that, my girl".
***

"When someone tells you to pray for him, do it without hesitation, wherever you are. You make a cross and say: <>. So say! In two words and with love".
[...]

The abbot said a lot about the state of society. "There will come," he said, "very difficult days. The world has gone mad". Father Simon was once asked, "What about the bombs that keep exploding around Athens?" It was around 1982-1983. And the Abbot said, "That's nothing. Much more you will see. Much more, so that the people who don't want to take heed will go through the trials."
The Abbot advised his spiritual sons: "When we speak of spiritual things, let us speak with humility and not all at once, for there is the evil spirit that distorts the truth and makes other words heard than those that have been spoken" (by the Fathers of the Church, by the Holy Scriptures).
Asked what he thought of the so-called ecumenist movement, the Abbot replied with the words of the happy Father and Saint Justin Popovich: "Ecumenism, my boy, is the heresy of the ages".
In a late-night conversation with a spiritual son, the Abbot told him, among other things, "This world in which we live does not know what it is doing. You do not seek to acquire from the sinful world truth and right judgment."

Translation by Caliopie Papacioc
www.cuvantul-ortodox.ro