Today, my dear friend, I greet you on Piraiki Ekklisia, at 91.2 FM, the station that speaks to our souls. And I ask you: How are you today? I want to know if you are well.

Are you well? If not, why not? My dear, you need to be well. Do something to help yourself get well. Do something so that you no longer answer, “What can we do? We’re not well. Life is hard.” Life is hard, and it always will be, but you must do something. Change your outlook. Change something within you so that you can see hardships as opportunities to struggle and grow. Learn to see a way forward where things look crooked, to see difficulties as occasions for growth. Become a spiritual person, cultivated, with an inner life and the inner resources to see things from another perspective. I cannot keep asking how you are and always find you weighed down. You have spent so many years

in the Church, so many years in the grace of God, so many years in the truth of Christ, and still you have not understood life’s great secret. What is that secret, you ask? It is that joy and sorrow are woven into life. Life holds both pain and happiness. It is like the sea: calm one moment, stormy the next. Accept that. Your life is like that too; you are no exception. What everyone else goes through, you will go through as well. The problem troubling you now will be resolved. Much of it has grown larger in your mind because you are magnifying it. It is not as tragic as it seems to you.

Someone else in your place, facing the very same problem, might meet it with more calm, gentleness, composure, humility, and inner—what is the word?—hesychia, inner stillness. Their soul would be quieter, less shaken. I think you know that your temperament tends toward anxiety. Others have told you so, and I expect you have seen yourself reflected in what they say. You are a very anxious person, very high-strung. You panic easily. You can become hysterical: shouting, screaming, terrified, falling apart very quickly, as though everything has collapsed and come to an end.

As we say, you drown in a spoonful of water. You drown in a spoonful, in a river, and in the ocean. If even a spoonful overwhelms you, naturally you will struggle everywhere. So do something to change. Ask our Christ, ask the Most Holy Theotokos, ask the saints you love to enlighten you, to change your way of thinking, to straighten out what has gone awry in your thoughts and to bring you peace. Try to see things differently, because, as I keep telling you, worry makes you ill. Sorrow can crush you. It wears down your soul, as you can see, and it takes a toll on your body too. The two are bound together:

soul and body go together. When your soul feels courage, strength, hope, optimism, living faith, a sense of God’s presence, a sense that you are held in God’s love and are a beloved creature of his,

that someone cares for you and holds you dear—and that someone is God, the Creator of the whole universe, the One who made you, the crucified love of Jesus Christ—then everything changes. When I feel that love, motherly, fatherly, brotherly, everything our Christ’s love can be, even my cells, my breathing, my blood pressure, my blood sugar, my kidneys, my gallbladder, my whole body work better. I want to ask you to find a way to live at least ten years beyond the age you have imagined for yourself. If you expect to reach ninety, I want you to reach a hundred. If you expect to reach a hundred, let me wish you a hundred and ten, and so on. Make your spiritual life and your inner world so fresh, renewed, and reborn that illness, decline, and death are slow to approach you, and you enjoy the fullest possible health of soul and body. I say it again: body and soul go together. Do not separate them. A human being is not just a soul, but a body too. We do everything with both body and soul.

I am presenting a radio program, but my lips are moving. I am thinking about what to say. My hands are moving; if you could see me, you would see me gesturing. My body takes part as I speak. My face has an expression right now. I make a face, I get angry, I smile, I laugh, I tell a joke. My body takes part, and so does my soul. If my soul is in good spirits, joyful, courageous, and strong, my body responds. The two go together. There are no actions that involve only the body, and none that involve only the soul. As soon as I think something, a biological and biochemical response passes through my body, affecting my cells, hormones, glands—everything.

Suppose you go up to a child in primary school who is playing happily and say, “You know what? Tomorrow your teacher is giving you a math test with some very hard problems.” You would see that happy little face fall. The child heard something, thought about it, and immediately felt it in the body. Many children get stomachaches on the morning of a difficult test. They feel sick, do not want to go to school, or get a headache they cannot explain. The body hurts because the soul is hurting too, tormented and anxious. But suddenly tell the child, “You know what? There’s no test. You’re going on a trip,” and you will see the joy touch both soul and body. The two go together.

I will never forget something I read in Counsels for Life, a book about the late Father Epiphanios Theodoropoulos, published by the Holy Monastery of Kecharitomene in Troezen, near Poros. If I remember rightly, it said that Father Epiphanios visited two of his spiritual children, a newly married couple. He saw that they had taken the icon of Christ down from above their bed. Now that they were married and living as husband and wife, with all that entailed, they felt it was unfitting for Christ to look on and be present in their most private, bodily moments. And Father Epiphanios

spoke to them about it. He said, “Why did you take down the icon of Christ? Do you think Christ is present only at the Divine Liturgy or when you pray, but absent from your private moments? Christ embraces everything. He is present; he blesses and sanctifies everything, and makes everything beautiful. These parts of our lives are not unworthy of him. He can bless our food, our walks, our bathing, our sleep, our health—all of it.” And he told them, “Please put the icon of Christ back where it was and continue your life together. Christ is with you. He blesses you, unites you, and fills you with grace.”

“May he give his peace to your souls and bodies.” I loved that. I also love the words sometimes written on an icon of Christ: “The Physician.” Our Christ is the Physician of our souls and bodies. He heals both. When a person feels God’s love and finds a measure of the calm Christ gives, of peace, hesychia—inner stillness—a conscience at rest, clear thoughts, and a pure heart, all these things greatly affect the health of the body. I wish you health of soul and body. And I pray that our Christ will do in your life today what

he did when he lived among us. Holy Scripture says that he “went about doing good and healing all.” Christ passed through this world—and listen, this program is called Unseen Passages—doing two things: good and healing for everyone. All who came near him, the Lord healed. Those who touched him felt life-giving strength and healing grace flow from him. He healed troubles of the soul and ailments of the body: blindness, paralysis, demonic possession, melancholy,

whatever tormented a person. One was paralyzed, another bedridden; they were made well in Christ’s presence. But to receive this, you must be able to draw on Christ’s power. I know your troubles, your illness, and your sorrow torment you. Such troubles are real, and healing is possible when a person can draw that healing power of Christ into their life. It is always there, even now. Christ has no less power today than he had then, and he is no less present where you are right now than anywhere else in the world.

Christ is present where you are now. He can share his presence, his grace, and his healing with you. The question is whether your soul is open. Is your heart open? Does it thirst to receive that healing, to draw it in? That is what matters. Are you ready to receive it, like a vessel open to being filled?

This matters greatly: to understand that Christ is present and his healing is possible now. Some people say, “If only I had lived in Christ’s time, I could have gone to him, spoken to him, and been healed.” But your life can change now, too. You do not have to go somewhere else. Of course, if you can travel or make a pilgrimage, that is lovely. But even if you cannot, Christ comes to you, because God is present everywhere

and fills all things. He fills, embraces, and blesses everything. That is my prayer for you: that his presence may surround and heal you, and that your soul may thirst for him.

Perhaps you are listening now in pain and sorrow. Or perhaps you are perfectly healthy and listening while you jog. But someone else, my friend, is listening from bed and cannot get up to join you. They have been confined there for months, in pain. They too are running—but to chemotherapy, radiation treatments, operations, stitches, wound care and dressing changes. Others suffer from nerve conditions, migraines, toothaches, aching bones or backs, eye operations, or unbearable ear pain. Every one of us has something.

Everyone has something. Once, during a talk, I said, “If I asked who here has absolutely nothing wrong and is completely healthy, I wonder how many hands would go up.” We all have some ache or pain. That is how closely pain is woven into our lives. But we can begin by changing how intensely we experience it. And then we can receive Christ’s healing—complete healing, or as much healing as Christ wills to give us and as much as we need. Something can change within you. For that to happen, let your soul change a little too. I have been saying this from the start of the program. Vasilis, how are you? You look so healthy, cheerful, and happy. I am glad Vasilis Katsinikolaou is with us again today. You have your own troubles too? Yes, I understand. We all have something; we all carry something. But

you know the saying: “A joyful heart makes the face bloom.” When the heart is glad within, the face blossoms. What a joy it is for the soul to be glad and balanced, living in harmony with other people, with God, and with the world around us. I say that because some people even take their anger out on things: slamming doors, throwing phones, breaking computers and keyboards. We have lost our calm and our balance, and our good relationship not only with God and other people, but even with the things around us. That is how deeply this sickness of the soul shows itself. Do you remember how our Christ first healed the soul? He would say to people, “My child, your sins are forgiven you. ”

And then He would say, “Now you can be healed in body too. Go.” He began with the soul, not because the soul is superior and the body inferior, but because our bodily state is also affected by the state of our soul and spirit. As I said, if your soul grows calm, your body will settle down too. A tormented, anxious, troubled soul releases toxins, poisons, and the whole body suffers. Your health suffers. That is why, with many illnesses, you go to the doctor and the doctor says, “My dear, something has happened to you recently. That is why you are like this.”

“Look at your blood pressure. Why has it risen so much? What happened?” And the patient says, “These past few days, I had another payment due, and I was terribly worried.” What is that worry? It is logismoi, intrusive thoughts; it is the thoughts and sorrow weighing on the soul and showing up in the blood pressure. Do you understand? The state of your soul affects your blood pressure and your blood sugar. A woman told me that she was dieting and eating carefully, choosing foods that would not raise her blood sugar. Then she measured it and found it was high. Her doctor told her, “It is not only about what you eat. It is also about what your soul is taking in. Are you feeding on worry? Are you swallowing sorrow, heartache, and pain?” We often say, “That person upset me so much they made me sick.” Or, “The pain and fear turned my hair white.”

We say someone turned pale with fear. Or someone says, “You’ve worried me sick.” They mean that a great sorrow has caused what doctors call the physical expression of anxiety. Anxiety takes a bodily form. Though it is something invisible, something you cannot put into a machine and see, it can affect the body. And that is the point our fathers, the monks, the elders, make when they say: “Do not be so troubled. Do not take everything so seriously. It is not worth it. It is not worth dying before your time. Why should worry make you grow old, become ill, turn gray, and lose your hair and teeth?” If those things happen for other reasons...

...because the years have passed and so on, I understand. But why should they happen now? Why be forty and look fifty-two or fifty-five? Why be fifty and look sixty, when you could look thirty-five? Why?

I knew a woman like this, and I know quite a few others, with many children. Someone said, “Why does that woman keep having so many children? Her body will wear out. Her face will wrinkle, and she’ll lose her looks.” Yet, to their surprise, relatives see her and say, “How old is she? She looks forty to me, perhaps forty-three or forty-five at most.” And she answers, “I’m not forty-five. I’m over sixty.” “How old?” “Sixty-two,” she says, or sixty-three, sixty-one, sixty-four. Women with many children can look twenty years younger. I have seen it in many families. Why? Because if having children fills you with happiness, despite all the work it certainly involves, it also gives your life meaning.

That is a great thing, isn’t it? Having a reason to live, something you love doing, is a real boost to your health. It brings you to life, renews you, refreshes you. It is like going to a spa for sand baths, mud baths, exercise, massages, and treatments, and coming out a new person. Yes, there is physical strain, but it refreshes your soul. And a refreshed soul affects the body too. I read a beautiful saying about this in the Old Testament, in the Wisdom of Sirach: “Gladness of heart is the life of a person.”

A person’s life, it says, is bound up with gladness of heart. Your heart rejoices; you are full of joy in what you do. Someone today who has work they enjoy and does it gladly receives life from it. Someone else may be out of work and be worn down by sadness, feeling incapable, unworthy, unsuccessful, useless. You are none of those things, by the way. These are difficult times for finding work, especially work you enjoy. But when your soul sinks, it shows in your face too. Someone sees you and says, “He looked so sad. There is such sorrow in his face.” Yes, because the sorrow in a tormented soul has appeared on the face.

Elsewhere in the same book of the Old Testament, the Wisdom of Sirach, it says, “A person’s rejoicing lengthens his days.” Do you want to live many years? Then let your soul rejoice. A person who feels that joy is strengthened by it.

Sometimes parents say to their children, when a child graduates and they attend the ceremony, or when one gets married, “My child, you’ve given me ten more years of life today.” Someone else might say, “I feel as though I’ve got a new kidney.” He means his health feels renewed. By what? By that great joy. And elsewhere Sirach says, “Love your soul, comfort your heart, and keep sorrow far from you.”

“For sorrow has destroyed many, and there is no benefit in it.” As we said, sorrow has destroyed many. It has crushed and sickened many people. Some have departed this world, and their doctors have said it happened after a great ordeal. A year or two later, people say, “That ordeal broke them. I don’t think this person will make it either.” The pain in the soul was so great that it struck the body too. Then the person fell ill and died. That is why Sirach says, “Love your soul and comfort your heart.” What lovely advice: love your soul. Love your life. Love what God loves. And what does He love? You. Love yourself, love your soul, care for your health. You deserve a beautiful life, a beautiful future, and a beautiful present—especially the present. You do. Love your life. Rest, sleep, wake up, work, and relax.

Look at something beautiful, listen to some good music, go for a walk. Who says these things? Father Porphyrios. They are not my words. They come from people who understood the secret of our weary souls. They gave those who came to them advice that might sound simple and easygoing, yet it gives the soul courage, and the body follows. Father Porphyrios would say, “Walk by the sea. Go to the beach with your husband and take a stroll.”

“Do you play the piano?” He told another person to listen to classical music. He told others to go to the opera and the theater; he went himself. Why? So that, by caring for your soul, you might help it find peace. Let me say something just between us: you are very tired too. Thank you very much. You have worn yourself out. Your life has become a routine, the same things over and over: wake up, work, rush about, children, expenses. The cycle keeps turning, with nothing to refresh you, nothing new or beautiful to brighten your life. You need that. You need to help yourself recover a little. These are difficult times already.

What matters most, though, is the state of our soul: keeping our spirits up, as people say. When the Apostle Paul was in a shipwreck, he told the people, “Men, take heart.” Strengthen your spirits. Find some drive within yourselves, an appetite for life, the strength to look ahead with hope. Otherwise you will collapse in both soul and body. This matters greatly: our thoughts should dwell in the light of Christ and in hope in Christ. Elsewhere it says, “Envy and anger shorten one’s days.” They shorten your life. Instead of living, say, a hundred years, you will live fewer. When does that happen? When your soul is consumed by envy...

...when you do not merely admire what others have but waste away with jealousy, and when you grow angry with people and judge them. Those things shorten your days. “And worry,” it says, “brings old age before its time.” Worry makes you old too soon. That is what I have been saying all along. If your anxiety reaches the point of madness—because, look, we all have some anxiety. I have some as I make this program; Vasilis has some as he puts on the music, and Phoebe does as she answers the phones. What were the numbers again? With 210 at the beginning, 4118602 and 4118640. Those are the numbers for the program.

The program’s email address is atheata.perasmata@yahoo.gr. If you write an email, please keep it to ten lines. If it is longer, I will read it when I can, perhaps many months later, when I find the time. I can manage ten lines. But when some people write ten pages telling me their whole life story—I do not mean to belittle your life—I simply do not have time to read so many emails that come in. Thank you for your love.

There you are. See how anxiety led me from one thing to another? We all have it. Vasilis, put on some music so I can say a little more about this anxiety that overwhelms us all and affects our health. All right? What will you play now, something tense or something relaxing? Let’s see.

It says that worry brings us to old age before our time. Someone might ask, “So should we sit around and move at a snail’s pace?” No. As I was telling you, even now, while I am making this program, I feel some pressure. I want to stay on time and on topic, for everything to go well, and to have something to say. Someone asks me, “How do you do it? Do you have a script? I don’t think you do, because I never see you reading.” And I say, “I can’t read from a script.” I have a rough idea of what I want to say, and then I begin speaking. I picture you, imagine your reactions, remember your letters, what you told me, what you wrote about your troubles, your phone calls. I bring all that together and ask God to help me, and you ask God too, and He gives me something to say. But even that brings some anxiety. There is also the pressure...

...that comes with making something and offering it to others. When you cook a meal, you feel a little pressure to get the timing right, add the salt, the tomato, the oil. I mean the kind of energy that helps you plan and stay alert. That is different from anxiety that drives you to distraction and makes you ill. We do not need to make ourselves sick over things and possessions, to die worrying about them while they remain for others to look at. Why? It is one thing to feel upset; it is another to be so anxious that it wears you down, with sorrow eating away at you. Someone told me, “It feels as though hot oil is flowing through my stomach and burning me inside.” “There you go,” I said. “That is quite a way to carry on.”

“You could end up bleeding from your stomach.” He told me, “I have an ulcer.” “Well,” I said, “where did that ulcer come from? What brought it on?” “From this terrible worry. It was as though something hot had dripped into my body and burned a hole in it.” That, he said, was what had happened to him. But why let yourself come to that?

One day I put a great pile of socks in the washing machine. Why am I telling you this? Listen. They were months’ worth of socks. I wash them all together now and then, and then I have enough for a long time. I put in nothing but socks. They were black socks, and the inside of the machine looked dark. The wash finished. I opened the door, and instead of socks coming out, all the water came pouring out. The water had stayed inside because the machine had broken down. It had stayed in there with the socks, and then it poured out of the bathroom and into the living room, across the wooden floors. The place flooded. You cannot see something like that and feel no anxiety.

If I had stood there saying, “First, let’s say a prayer. I’ll say the Our Father, and then we’ll see what to do,” the water would have reached outside the apartment. So I pushed the washing machine shut as best I could. Half the socks were still inside, and the others were hanging out. I put down a towel to soak up some water and stop it spreading. Then I hurried to get my phone and call a plumber I know. All that takes some urgency. But I was also telling myself, “Come on, sing a little song.” I laughed at the thought of what had happened with that washing machine. Do you know why I laughed? I didn’t want my soul to collapse into the feeling that everything was a disaster. I could have said, “Oh no, I’m finished!” But I wasn’t. Even if the wood floor had swollen—and one soaking usually won’t do that—even if something was damaged, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. That could be dealt with too.

We have gifts and strength within us. We can find a way to get through hardships and overcome them. I tried to remember that. I had once felt something like it in Jerusalem. After visiting the Most Holy Sepulchre, I went with some people I knew to eat at a restaurant there. We were eating among the other diners.

At a nearby table, someone dropped a plate and broke it. The whole restaurant began to applaud. I had never seen that before. People turned toward him, clapping and smiling, as if to say, “Relax. Take it another way. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh no, what a disaster,’ you can say, ‘Well, something unusual happened today. We broke a plate. What can we do?’” The waiters came over.

They were smiling, and he was smiling too. He got past that first rush of fear: “I’ve caused damage. I’ve broken something.” What I mean is that you can see anything from its most tragic side, or you can meet it more calmly and peacefully. It comes down to—you know the word—to a choice. You choose. Will you choose to trust God and stay calm, knowing that He has permitted this mishap? Or will you keep going over what happened and how? When anxiety takes hold, it is as though you forget what you believe. That kind of anxiety can make you ill. It is forgetfulness: you have forgotten that God exists, and that He knows and permits even the fall of a single leaf.

Whatever happens in life, something good can come of it. You have to face it and ask, “My God, what do You want from me now that the washing machine has flooded the place?” “My child, I want you to calm down. I want you to repair it, or buy a new one.” There is no point sinking into sorrow. Change what you can change; what you cannot change, accept calmly.

That is how it is. I will accept things as God brings them to me. Or I will change them, if they can be changed. If someone has a health problem, they should do what they can about it. If it cannot be changed, they will have to accept it. Say your little child was born with a problem affecting their eyes or legs, or has Down syndrome, or some other condition. You do what you can to help. What you cannot change, you accept. There is another lovely word for this: you make peace with it. You become a friend to this situation. You say, “I cannot spend my whole life complaining. I will only grow old in bitterness, and it will change nothing.” So what do you do? You let yourself flow. What does that mean? You move with things, like a river.

Picture it. There is something beautiful about moving with the river of life. And within that river, Christ guides the waters and their course, while you let yourself be carried. Do you know when it becomes difficult? When you resist, when you will not let go, when you try to go against that river, even though Christ is there behind it. Then you wear yourself out, and that resistance brings illness.

Resistance to the flow of life. How lovely it sounds, and how hard it is to live that way. I know that from my own experience. My dear friend, dear friends, as I say these things, I hear them myself and think, “What are you saying?” Just now, when I said that, I thought, “Well said. But do you live that way?” I keep asking myself.

You resist! You resist the way God is leading things. God brings one thing, and I want another. God leads me one way, and I want to go somewhere else. So I acknowledge that all this is the healing and the answer the Church gives us, that Christ gives us. But we are not good patients. We do not follow the treatment well, and so we suffer. That is why we suffer.

If you enter into the spiritual life and live as Christ wants, you will see many changes. You will become healthier in both body and soul. Today I will tell you just one small thing. We have more to say in other broadcasts about the health of soul and body, and how the soul affects the body. If a person enters the Church in the right way—truly wanting to become a Christian, to belong to Christ, to receive His holy anointing and blessing, and to gain a spiritual life—instead of ending up arguing, accusing others, getting angry, and feeling envy, then that person will gain a great benefit. I mean someone who truly lives an inward spiritual life.

A benefit to both soul and body. In the Church, you can become well: you enter and find healing. But if you do not enter as you should, you do not find that healing. Saint Porphyrios the Kafsokalyvite said that some people take part in the life of the Church without taking in the nourishment it holds. It is like eating a piece of fruit but somehow losing all its vitamins.

You eat the fruit; you go through the motions of Church life. You attend church and do the outward things, but you miss what matters within. You do not reach the heart of it. When you eat an orange, its goodness is not in the peel. It is in the juice and the flesh inside. It is the same in the Church. The point is not simply to get up and walk to the building. Your soul must take in what we have been talking about and come into tune with God.

If you go to church and become agitated, if you learn to quarrel, to wound others, to dislike people, to form factions and say, “I am good, we are good, but that person is bad,” you are living in conflict. That is not the spiritual growth Christ wants for us. If you are not speaking to your child or your wife, or you have fallen out with your brother, being in the Church cannot bring you health in that state. That will surely have troubling effects. Take fasting, for example. God willing, we will talk more about it in other broadcasts. Fasting can help a person greatly, in both soul and body. It brings health.

Of course, fasting has to be done properly. Someone told me, “I fasted all through Lent, gained five kilos, and then the doctor found my cholesterol was high.” Well, yes. It depends on how you fast.

If you eat too much, filling up all the time on bread, rice, pasta, pies, and other starchy foods, naturally that will not make you stronger. But if you fast in moderation, eating fruit and legumes and taking a break from heavy foods, your stomach feels lighter and your soul is more cheerful. You wake up ready to face life, and prayer comes more easily. You know how too much food can leave you sluggish and sleepy. You also learn to restrain your appetite. You look at food and ask, “What am I really seeking here?” You reflect on what place food has in your life. You may say, “All right, I can go without meat for a while. Food is not everything.” You begin to think things through, to step back, and to appreciate the things of God.

At an art exhibition, you do not press your nose against a painting to see it. You stand back and say, “Look how beautiful it is from here. See the perspective, the shadows, the colors.” Fasting gives you that distance too. You say, “During this season, we do not eat these foods.” A man told me about his first attempt to fast through Lent without meat. “I’ll start with meat alone,” he said. “That’s the first step I can manage.” I told him, “Good. Do what you can.” Later he said, “You cannot imagine how good it felt to master myself, to hold my desires in check. I wanted meat, but I told myself, ‘No, you will not eat meat. Dear stomach, I will decide what you eat. My stomach will not rule me.’”

John of Sinai says that our belly is the mistress of the house: she is in charge, and we do whatever she says. But we can say, “No, we will not do whatever you say.” The ruling nous, my spiritual intellect, and illumined thought tell me: I will not eat this now; I will eat that. We do not eat at this hour; we will eat later. The man went on: “I could also restrain my anger toward my wife, at work, and in traffic.” That discipline carries over into other parts of life. Someone who opens the fridge whenever he likes and eats and drinks beer or soft drinks whenever he wants, whatever he wants and as much as he wants, may do the same in everything else. When I feel like saying no to my children, I say no, because I have grown used to doing whatever I please. But when you learn discipline and your child says, “Come, Dad, let me tell you a story,” you can respond, “I want you to tell me,” even though you feel like saying, “No, I don’t want to hear it. I can’t be bothered.”

Then you can ask yourself what will help, rather than simply what feels pleasant. The pleasant thing might be to say, “My child, I’m sleepy today. I want to go to bed, and I don’t want to talk.” That would be easier for me. But fasting teaches you to do what is beneficial, even when it is hard. Your child benefits when you listen despite being tired. That, too, is a kind of fast. If you learn to fast from foods, you may find it helps your conduct and your character as well. Fasting can bring cheerfulness, vitality, and a sense of well-being. Of course, I am speaking about those of us who live in cities. For us, fasting often means choosing our food more carefully; we are hardly starving. Ascetics and people in monasteries may keep a much stricter fast, and it does not always leave them feeling cheerful. Some truly become exhausted by it.

Their struggle is greater and harder. They labor to bring life to the soul while the body is weak and tired. We, meanwhile, have plenty to eat. If we do not eat meat, we can eat all sorts of other things. I knew someone who had fasted throughout his life, and his blood test results were consistently very good.

They showed healthy, balanced, normal levels. That is one thing I wanted to share with you. We will say more another time, because our time has run out. And I do not want to get anxious myself: as I said, anxiety can turn into sorrow, and sorrow can feel like poison in the body. The soul affects the body. You agree, don’t you? Vasilis Chatzinikolaou, thank you for being with us again today, and thank you for the beautiful music. He is the composer and sound engineer for our program. And thank you, my dear friend, for your love and for your emails.

And thank you for buying our books, which, as you told me, have helped you. What we share here belongs to you too; I’ve told you that before. The two books are Strengthen Your Soul and Love Forever. Um...

Thank you for praying for all your brothers and sisters, and for including me in your prayers. I do the same. I pray and ask God to send His grace and His angels to help you with whatever you are facing, wherever you are. To all of you who are troubled, weary, or ill in soul or body, I pray that God, through His Saints, will bless your lives, your bodies, your thoughts, every cell of your being. Where there is pain, may there be

relief; where there is illness, may there be health; and where there are sighs, may there be praise to God. Another time we’ll talk more about prayer, confession, refraining from judging others, and the Mysteries of the Church, and how all these help us grow healthier in soul and body. I wish you well, and we’ll speak again next week...

Be joyful and keep smiling. You have a reason to smile: God loves you. Is that a small thing? It isn’t. So smile. It brings healing, it pleases God, and it shows that Christ is beginning to enter our souls. When Christ enters, we see the fruit He brings: ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace.’ Love, joy, and peace come first. And I think that joy comes with a smile that says, ‘We’ll get through this. God will provide. Something good will happen in our lives too.’ Take care, my dear friends. We’ll speak again. God be with us. Farewell.