International competition 🫶
Dear friends, you were so actively involved in the previous competition that we decided to announce a new one 😉

Conditions: you take any of Fr. Sergiy's books and take a video of your favorite extract, just like in the example (by @psiholog_rimma). The video should be no more than 1 minute long. It may be without subtitles. Leave your videos in the comments 👇

Download the books in English here:
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/2lGoClKKRn2JyA

We will publish the best extracts and send our giftbook-album "Christ is the Sweetest Word" to our three winners. Two weeks to go. Let's get started! 🩶

How should I, a middle-aged person, prepare myself for my 1st confession?
#archpriestSergiyBaranov
#questions

In order to deal with so-called “minor sins”, it is extremely important for a person to have spiritual strength and patience. So, how do we gain strength and patience? Physical toughness grows when we do physical exercises. To make the spirit stronger, one needs spiritual ones.
I will always remember an event from my childhood. A boy from another city came to ours for summer holidays. At that time, the guys from our yard were crazy about the pull-up bar exercises, while this boy was so physically feeble that he could not do a single pull-up, not to mention any other special exercises. About 40 years have passed since that time until today. I remember the strength of his will. He started to come up to the bar every day – in the morning, midday, and evening – and by the end of the second month he started to perform unbelievable tricks on that bar! All of us were deeply impressed, watching him, with our mouths open, wondering if it was possible to have made such progress within two months? The key to this is very simple: the result was born out of diligence and commitment.
From the book "Fly High"
#archpriestSergiyBaranov
#TabynHermitage

Is it necessary for a woman to pray covered?
#archpriestSergiyBaranov
#questions

I wrote a play, about an asylum. A doctor says to his patients there, "Well, at least your motivation is good." Sometimes a person has good motivation but is not aimed for the result and behaves like a bull in a china shop. It is about more harm than good. You should always consider the result and act for the sake of it, not for the sake of your wise words. One may talk a lot but have no result at all or have a negative result. As sometimes, you say something, and it turns out that the moment is wrong, the person is wrong, the way you do it is wrong or unwise, or it is wise but not appropriate. Be careful and delucate with your relatives, do not overfeed them with Orthodoxy.
Take good care of yourselves and let them see that Orthodoxy makes you better, not worse.
#archpriestSergiyBaranov
#orthodoxy

When a person is on the edge of a precipice, no one should, God forbid, fling about. You might push him down by a shout or any of your emotions. He stands on the edge and the stones already fall down from under his feet, at this moment, you should freeze like a surgeon, who operates on the eye, and be careful. The same is with our relatives who are on the edge of a spiritual precipice. We should be very delicate to not push them down there. This is the way of how a human is created: as soon as you draw him to yourself fastly, he will immediately shrink back from you. When we drag even a close person to the Kingdom of Heaven, he involuntarily makes a move back. There is a sad joke: when someone begins to go to church, the rest of his family become martyrs. He tortures his family so much that everyone thinks, "Orthodoxy is such a horrible religion! How well we lived without it!
👇

My instructress gave me a prayer rule of 3000 prayers. I carry it out but she inspires me to do 6000 prayers a day. I am afraid that I will do them mechanically but she says I have got stuck. I have no one to ask and it turns out that I am not obedient.
#archpriestSergiyBaranov
#questions
You may ask your questions on spiritual life👇