Be ready to receive all kinds of despise and offences, condemnations and slanders from everyone, even from those you don`t expect that.
Consider yourself worthy of them and receive everything with gratitude and joy. Endure any toil and sadness and danger coming from the demons, as one who fulfilled their will.
Endure courageously the deprivation of the necessary ones, the unpleasant events and the sorrows of life. Endure, having trust in God, even the lack of your daily food, which in a few hours becomes trash. Endure all these willingly, putting your hope in God and not waiting from anyone else any release or comfort.
As any help coming from the people is given as a result of the enlightenment and guidance coming out from God. Leave therefore all your worries to God and in all your troubles blame yourself, saying that you are the cause of all the evils, as one who ate from the forbidden fruit of the tree and got different passions. So receive gratefully the sorrows which will wake you from your drowsiness and will make you sweeten yourself with the grace of God.
Excerpt from About temptations, sorrows, pains and patience – Saint Isaac the Syrian, Evanghelismos Publishing, Bucharest.
