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MEET RUBY KATE AND "THREE WISHES"
from: GoFundMe
Last summer, 11-year-old Ruby Kate followed her mom to work helping out at nursing homes in the area. While there, Ruby Kate learned that many of the residents had little financial means. Many couldn't even afford to feed or keep their beloved pets. She wanted to help, so she pulled out a notebook and went from room to room asking residents, "If you could have three wishes, what would they be?" Now, with her notebook full of hope, Ruby Kate is on a mission to help the elderly—one wish at a time.
In Ruby Kate's and her mom Amanda's words, the story of "Three Wishes":
A: For the past 23 years, I've owned a business where I go and help people in nursing homes. I regularly go to five nursing homes. My job is really busy. And when she's not in school, Ruby Kate goes to work with me. This summer, we were up there quite a bit, and the nurse in me tries to make that as useful and meaningful for her as possible, as well as for my other two kids. Ruby Kate has a big heart, and the residents there love her.
Often, the patients I help are low on family and low on funds. The government funds over half of our nursing home patients in the U.S. These patients are allotted $40 per month for anything not covered under room and board for "extras." A haircut is "extra," and so is taking care of your pet. If they don't have family that can cover the gaps, they go without.
Last summer, Ruby Kate spent time with nursing home residents who receive just $40 per month for "extras." She asked them, "If you could have three wishes, what would they be?"
RK: One Saturday while we were at the nursing home, I have to admit that I was kind of bored. But then I saw this woman named Pearl, and she was looking out the window. I was a little excited, like, "What's going on?" But when I looked out, all I saw was someone walking a dog out to their car. I asked Pearl, "What's so important?" She told me that it was her dog of 12 years, and she didn't know the next time she would see it. [read more...]
METROPOLITAN EPIFANIY SAYS RUSSIAN CHURCH TO KEEP OPERATING IN UKRAINE
from: UNIAN Information Agency
(23 Jan.) Leader of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine Epifaniy has said a certain number of parishes will remain in Ukraine, subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church.
"According to our estimates, there will be a certain number of parishes in Ukraine, which will be subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church. This is logical, and we have no objections to this," he said in an interview with the Greek edition TaNea, according to a posting on his Facebook page.
Epifaniy says the Russian Orthodox Church will further be able to serve its believers in Ukraine. "Those who decide to stay with the Russian church should not feel any kind of pressure. These parishes should have equal rights with those belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church," he said. Epifaniy believes that gradually, "our relations will be normalized, our peoples will restore friendship, good and peaceful relations."
As UNIAN reported earlier, the Unification Council of members of the Ukrainian Orthodox churches in Kyiv on December 15 elected Metropolitan of Pereyaslavsky and Bila Tserkva from the then Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate Epifaniy (also known as Epiphanius I) as head of the new local Orthodox church in Ukraine. [read more...]
(25 Jan.) The Church of Cyprus plans to recognize Metropolitan Epifaniy. "The time will come for His Beatitude Epifaniy to visit Cyprus and to concelebrate with us," Archbishop Chrisostomos said, Cerkvarium reports, citing the Greek media outlet Phos Phanariou, Light of the Phanar.
The Primate of the Church of Cyprus said that he had heard Metropolitan Epifaniy expressing a desire to establish communion and replied that it is quite natural. He also noted that Epifaniy had already visited Cyprus previously, knows the local situation well and speaks Greek.
Archbishop Chrysostomos has given such an answer to Metropolitan Elpidophoros of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who is on a visit to the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. Metropolitan Elpidophoros has gifted to Chrysostomos his newly published book on the visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to Ukraine in 2008.
Also, the Head of the Cypriot Church has said that he considers the Ecumenical Patriarchate to be the Mother Church, emphasizing that "he maintains good relations with the Phanar, which he will preserve despite any difficulties." [read more...]
PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH SAYS HE OPPOSES ACTIONS AIMED AT DIVIDING ORTHODOX CHURCHES
from: Interfax-Religion
(18 Jan.) Patriarch John X of Antioch and All the East says he supports the unity of Orthodox Churches. "We, for our part, have appealed to the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople and asked him to make efforts to unite the Churches and resolve the differences that have arisen. We deeply regret this situation and we fully support you on this issue," the patriarch said during a meeting with Russian parliamentarians devoted to the situation of the Church in Ukraine.
The Church of Antioch, as an Orthodox Church, would very much like to "maintain the unity of Orthodox Christians in the world," he said. "We strongly oppose what is now happening in the entire Orthodox world, which is partly aimed at dividing and weakening Orthodox Churches," the patriarch said.
He praised Russia's assistance to the people of Syria. "What Russia, the people of Russia, and the Russian Church are doing in Syria is aimed, above all, at helping the people of Syria, at bringing peace to the Syrian land," he said.
A delegation of Russian parliamentarians is now visiting Syria. It includes Dmitry Sablin, the coordinator of the group of friendship of the parliaments of Russia and Syria, Sergey Gavrilov, the chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Development of Civil Society, and Dmitry Belik, the Duma deputy from Sevastopol. [read more...]
IN EUROPE'S POOREST COUNTRY: MOLDOVA LOCAL CHURCH SENDS MISSION TEAM
from: Salisbury Post
(2 Dec.) Dust covered their shoes as the Americans walked the rutted dirt roads through the villages outside Chisinau, Moldova, and handed out bags of food. The villagers have nothing but concrete block stucco houses with clay tiled roofs. They gather food from back yard gardens, and their meat roams freely within a rickety fence. Chickens, ducks and geese wandering and waiting until their destiny ends on their master’s table.
Dr. Bill Coleman, associate pastor of He’s Alive Church in Kannapolis, led a team of 20 people to Chisinau, Moldova from Oct. 9-18 this fall — four men and 16 women, ages 20 to 69, from new Christians to seasoned saints. God bonded the team and used them to minister to people in the poorest country in Europe. Coleman made his first mission trip in 2001, to India, and it lit a fire in him. Since then, he has been on 25 international trips and has led 23 of them.
He met Victor and Shanna Pascaru at a camp for Moldovan young adults outside of Carpineni when he taught there in 2006. Pascaru told Coleman he intended to plant a church, and they have stayed in touch ever since. Every year or so, Coleman takes a team to Moldova. Pascaru's church is just one of the ministries the team works with. The church is in Cainairi, a small village with about 5,000 people.
Pascaru met his wife, Shanna, while she was a missionary teaching English in Moldova. He was the pastor's son at the church she was attending. They have six biological children and one foster child, a Moldovan teenager. [read more...]
INITIATIVE CALLS ON POPE, BULGARIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH PATRIARCH TO VISIT FORMER BELENE PRISON CAMP
from: Sofia Globe
(2 Jan.) An initiative has been launched calling for Pope Francis and Bulgarian Orthodox Church Patriarch Neofit to visit the former Belene political prison camp during the Pope’s visit to Bulgaria in May 2019. Roman Catholic priest Father Paolo Cortesi told Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) on January 2 that the initiative was called "The Truth Will Set Us Free."
Belene was used as a prison camp by Bulgaria’s communist regime between 1949 and 1989. In the early years of that regime, more than 2300 people were held there. In the 1980s, those who resisted the communists’ policy of forced renaming of Bulgarians of Turkish ethnicity were detained in the camp.
Among those who were imprisoned in Belene during the communist era were Roman Catholic priests and clergy from other denominations. Father Paolo, who was in the headlines in March 2017 after being recalled from Bulgaria after getting death threats for accommodating Syrian refugees in his parish of Belene, later returning several months later, referred to the prison island as the "capital of memory."
Should the Pope and the Bulgarian Patriarch visit the former prison island, "it will be a good sign that will give a lot of spiritual energy to all of Bulgaria." [read more...]
OTHER NEWS HEADLINES:
THE MYTH OF A CHRISTIAN REVIVAL IN EASTERN EUROPE
from The American Conservative
39.7 MILLION – NOT 200 MILLION CHRISTIANS IN CHINA
from Russian Evangelical Alliance
IN VINNYTSIA REGION, UOC-MP PRIESTS AND "TITUSHKAS" DISRUPT MEETING ON TRANSFER TO OCU
from Religious Information Service of Ukraine
STOCKING OUTREACH INTRODUCES RUSSIAN ORPHANS TO CHRIST
from Mission Network News
UKRAINIAN RADA PASSES BILL ON TRANSITION OF COMMUNITIES FROM ONE CHURCH TO ANOTHER
from Interfax-Religion
OVER 100 PARISHES HAVE JOINED ORTHODOX CHURCH OF UKRAINE
from Religious Information Service of Ukraine
METROPOLITAN HILARION MEETS WITH PATRIARCH THEOPHILOS III OF JERUSALEM
from Russian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate
POLITICAL FREEDOM OR SPIRITUAL FREEDOM?
from Orthodox Christianity
NORTH KOREA AGAIN IDENTIFIED AS THE WORST COUNTRY FOR CHRISTIANS
from ChristianPersecution.com
WANING SERB INFLUENCE OVER ORTHODOX CHURCH IN THE BALKANS
from TRTWORLD
NOW, OUR VIEWS:
Help Us Spread the Word!
Dear friend and crowd-fund-raiser,
Thank you for your willingness to help with crowdfunding! I appreciate you more than I can put into words! This is an entirely grassroots effort to prove that ordinary Christians can Build the ARC – Agape Restoration Communities – to restore Christian community based on agape-love.
The poor are not trash. The lame are not junk. The maimed are not throw-aways. My wife and I often visit people in hospitals, nursing homes and in home care. Why? Because frequently nobody else has the time or interest in these people, sometimes not even their families or their pastors. When you are old and very likely disabled (70% probability), who will care about you?
All each one of us needs to do is to share this appeal with the next person, and the next, and the next... and soon this campaign will GO VIRAL! It will amaze the nay-sayers and Sunday-go-to-meeting Christians that believers actually care about "the poor, the lame, the maimed and the blind"!
What we need you to do is print out 3, 6 or 9 sheets of our "How YOU Can Help!" PDF file, cut each into 4 parts, and give them to your friends. And if you really want to help, print and distribute more! LET'S GO VIRAL!!
Then you need to come back every day to www.Agape-Restoration-Society.org/ARC/, on each web-page use the "share" buttons to share each page to your Social Media and Email. The next day, start where you left off: go to the next page on the above web-folder and do the same. I can’t do this all alone, I need your help! I may have a few thousand Social Media contacts, but all of us together have millions and millions of contacts!
Don't assume that if you share all my ARC pages just once, all your Social Media friends will see your posts – the Social Media's software algorithms only display a small fraction of what people post, and also, by the time your friends check in, your post likely has "floated downstream" and is out of sight, so you need to Share Daily, over and over again!
Repetition is how advertising works! So... LET'S GO VIRAL!!!
When your friends do the same, and their friends and contacts also do the same, and on and on... we've created a movement to restore Christian community based on agape-love!
LET'S GO VIRAL!!!! (Didn't I say that already?)
Our first news article MEET RUBY KATE AND "THREE WISHES" should touch your heart just as it did mine! Here's an 11-year-old girl who has a heart for the disabled and elderly in nursing homes. She's learned this from her mother, a nurse. It doesn't take much: my wife Cheryl and I take 15 minutes to drive to the nursing home where our disabled elderly friend from church is staying, then maybe 30 minutes to shave him, give him a haircut or wash his hair, read a few Bible verses and pray with him, then 15 minutes to drive home. Can you afford 60 minutes once or twice a week to demonstrate the agape-love of Christ to those in need? If a million Christians started doing this, it would change the whole world!
According to our second news article METROPOLITAN EPIFANIY SAYS RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH TO KEEP OPERATING IN UKRAINE, the new head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Metropolitan Epifaniy, says the Russian Orthodox Church is welcome to continue shepherding those Orthodox parishes in Ukraine that choose to stay under the umbrella of the Moscow Patriarchate. As our sixth news headline OVER 100 PARISHES HAVE JOINED ORTHODOX CHURCH OF UKRAINE relates, however, now that the OCU has canonical status many parishes are switching over to the new, "real" Ukrainian church.
CHURCH OF CYPRUS PLANS TO RECOGNIZE ORTHODOX CHURCH OF UKRAINE says our third news article: about half of the world's Eastern Orthodox are recognizing the new OCU. But the other half aren't yet: PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH SAYS HE OPPOSES ACTIONS AIMED AT DIVIDING ORTHODOX CHURCHES, our fourt news article, explains that the Church of Antioch - headquartered in Damascus - feels a strong loyalty to Russia and its Orthodox Church for the protection and provisions they are bringing to Syria. This gratitude is natural.
Another article, METROPOLITAN EPIFANIY AWAITS RECOGNITION OF OCU BY GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH, indicates that another of the Orthodox churches around the world is in the process of recognizing the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine. We shall see how it all settles out in the end. Pray for peace and unity in the Church!
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Our seventh news headline METROPOLITAN HILARION MEETS WITH PATRIARCH THEOPHILOS III OF JERUSALEM tells of Russian Orthodox Metr. Hilarion's meeting with Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem on 10 January in which "problems on the agenda of inter-Orthodox relations" were discussed. Shortly thereafter, Interfax Religion reported PATRIARCH OF JERUSALEM PERSONALLY BLESSES CANONICAL UKRAINIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH BELIEVERS and cancelled his scheduled meeting with Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko. Coincidence?
On a personal note, I'd like to thank all those who were praying for my colonoscopy that took place on 17 Jan. They found and removed six "sessile" polyps, which are one of the types that can become cancerous. But the pathology report was negative: no cancer, praise the Lord!
GO TO: Hosken-News Blog to WRITE YOUR COMMENTS or to SHARE THIS ↓ ESSAY with your friends.
Those Pesky Commas!
"Picky, picky, picky! What difference does it make, anyway? Are you from the Grammar Police?" - some people say, when you point out a misuse of the comma. But as the picture shows, leaving out a comma where it should be, or inserting a comma where it shouldn't be, can completely change the meaning of a sentence. A prime example of inserting commas where they shouldn't be is found in Eph. 4:11-12 -
“He gave some to be apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints, to do the work of ministering, to the building up of the Body of Christ."
What does this Scripture text say to you? It seems to list eight spiritual offices or tasks:
1. apostles, 2. prophets, 3. evangelists, 4. pastors, 5. teachers, 6. equip the saints, 7. do the work of ministering, 8. build up the Body of Christ.
This is the way the King James Version had the punctuation, which gives you the impression that apostles (bishops), prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers should equip the saints, do the work of ministering, and build up the Body of Christ. But is it what the Apostle Paul really meant when he composed these words?
Most newer translations omit those last two commas, as we show here. It completely changes the meaning, so we understand that the apostles (bishops), prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers are to equip the saints to do the work of ministering to build up the Body of Christ. The Church leadership offices aren't supposed to do all the work; instead, they are supposed to equip or train the saints (that's the rest of us in the congregation) to do diakonia-ministry!
What is diakonia-ministry? The Greek word diakonia simply means service, serving others, helping out. "Minister" sounds like an important title, such as "Prime Minister" or "Minister of Defense" or "Reverend." Today when we hear the word "Minister" we probably think of someone in a suit and tie, or a black robe and a clerical collar, someone who doesn't want to get his hands dirty. But in Greek a diakon (deacon) is just a servant, a slave, someone to do the dirty work.
These days we want to hire someone and pay barely over minimum wage to prepare and serve food, mow the lawn, shovel snow, take care of sick and disabled people, etc. But Eph. 4:11-12 tells us that all the saints (that's us!) are supposed to be serving food to the poor, caring for the sick, doing whatever it takes to maintain and build up the Body of Christ.
We know this is what the Apostle Paul meant, because just a few verses later he urged that "we may grow up in all things into Him Who is the head, Christ; from Whom all the Body, being fitted and knit together through that which every joint supplies, according to the working in measure of each individual part, makes the Body increase to the building up of itself in love." (verses 15-16).
Each individual member of the Church, each and every one of us, are to build up the Church, the Body of Christ, through what every joint, ligament, sinew and muscle supplies. And how to we do this? We allow ourselves to be trained and equipped to do hands-on ministry. We don't think so highly of ourselves that "we're too busy, or too highly-paid, to do some job that's below our station in life."
Instead, we submit to the leadership of the bishop, the pastor, the teacher, etc. so that we learn how to do diakonia-ministry. This is how the Early Church grew by leaps and bounds: it mobilized every member to do his or her share toward building up the Body of Christ!
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Please remember to pray for Christians in socialist countries, and for...
Your fellow-servants,
Bob & Cheryl
p.s. There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and trying to make them equal. - F.A. Hayek
- 26 Jan. 2019