There are times in life that you sit back and take stock of your life.

The trail of your life winds away behind you and before you, the past an altogether too clear collection of choices gone wrong and lives destroyed by your carelessness. These relationships lay strewn along the path like deadwood after a storm, the ground pocked and marked by the passing of countless battles and skirmishes, the valley of your existence, where there was once beauty and life is now a nightmarish testament to your own selfishness and foolishness. A barren land where only regret and self dillusion can thrive.

Before you stretches away eternity. An ever shifting zone of mist and possibility never substantial until the moment of its birth where it becomes the present, but by then it is far too late to prepare yourself for what is to come, so trapped now in the maddening present you continue your reign of carnage and destruction. And behind you fresh corpses begin to appear. Along this path we must walk, a wraith in a land of twilight. In the midst of this all, there are moments of clarity. Brief fleeting seconds where the mist coalesces and before you stands a person. The identity is usually different, sometimes a teacher, others a beloved friend. But always they offer the same thing, escape. A way out of this half existence that threatens to crush that spark of the Divine that resides in us all. For the most part we ignore them. We thank them, but staunchily refuse thier help. Worst of all, there are those of us so far gone that we can not even recognize our own jeopardy.

Since making the decision to follow Orthodox doctrine, and joining St. Athansius Orthodox Church I have had the oppurtunity to escape the ruin and destruction that my life has become. But I have not.

The Orthodox believe that the chuch is for the healing of the body, mind and soul. That the local parish is an E.R. and the priest and the Holy Spirit the physicians that are waiting to heal you. Unfortunately the decision to be healed is more difficult to make than can be imagined.

I think that last night I finally made that decision.

My life is a mockery of what is real and I no longer have the stomach for the destruction that I have, and continue to wreak on others. I wish to have the valley of my soul cleansed, the poison that has corrupted it these many years wiped away. The death and decay that have taken root there to be expunged. I wish to live.

Thank you for your help Kevin.

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