Two thousand years ago, a fire humbly and meekly exploded into our reality. That fire was Christ. Take the Journey Toward Perfection and be transformed. You will undergo a metamorphosis. You will become the butterfly that God always meant for you to be.
A Journey Toward Perfection reveals a path toward developing an intimate experiential relationship with God. It is an in-depth study of the attributes recorded in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. These are the attributes God bestowed upon us when He created us in His image. They are the traits necessary to love others as God loves us. When Christ invited us to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow Him, He asked us to follow His example. He encouraged us to take a journey toward perfection, toward a loving God who extends His open arms to us even as Christ’s arms were extended on the cross. He challenged us to develop characteristics, such as humility, meekness and purity of heart. If we accept His invitation, we will embark on a life-changing journey. We will find ourselves walking in the footsteps of Christ. We will experience what He experienced and see life through His eyes. We will learn how profound His love for us truly is. We will begin to develop attributes of Christ that will sustain us through the many trials and tribulations of our lives. We will experience God’s true presence in our lives.
Helen Kamenos has been an educator for over 26 years. She graduated from California State University, Northridge with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Subsequently, she earned her Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership. She served as a middle school teacher, high school counselor, and principal of a private school. She dreamed of writing a book one day, but never imagined she would write a book about God.
Throughout Helen’s life, her passion for learning and her fervent Orthodox Christian faith have always guided her toward seeking a greater understanding of God. When she faced several years of life-changing challenges, including a battle with cancer, Helen sought the comfort of her faith. This pursuit led to an in-depth study of the Beatitudes, which set her on a journey of discovery. In the process, she experienced Christ in a more personal and intimate way. This extraordinary journey provided her with a deeper understanding of God and His divine love. In A Journey Toward Perfection, Helen shares her new found insights of living the Christian life by following in the footsteps of Christ and participating in a real, experiential relationship with our Creator.
We view the death of a loved one as a profound loss, and it is. It is the loss of being able to express our love to that person and a loss of experiencing their love for us. We experience something missing in our hearts, a piece is gone. The separation from our loved ones causes us pain because we love them. This is how God feels for us. If we have experienced loss of a loved one, we have experienced the loss that God feels for us through our separation from him.
However, we need to stop and take it a step further. For God, our death is a reunion! Our death is our passage back into the His loving arms. He is overjoyed to be reunited with us. Therefore from God's point of view, death just means the end of our separation from Him. It is a joyous occasion! Thanks to Christ, death has been vanquished!
I Corinthians 15:54-57:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Book Excerpt
A Journey Toward Perfection
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)
When we think of the word “mourn,” we think of being sorrowful for a loved one who has passed on. The loss of a loved one can evoke great sorrow within us. Even if we believe that those we love are happy in heaven, we still experience a deep sadness for the loss of their presence. At times, we can feel inconsolable. This is an expression of our love for them. We want them with us. We want to experience their love for us. Even when they are gone, we often experience moments when we believe they are with us, and we believe we have experienced their love for us from beyond the grave. We are convinced they are still with us, and in a sense, they are, since they live in the eternal realm with God.
When Christ said that those who mourn shall be comforted, He meant those who mourn their own condition of being “dead in sin.” Originally, when God created man, he was perfect. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were banished from paradise because, by their own free will, they rejected God and chose evil. They were punished by being removed from God’s presence, no longer able to have fellowship with Him. Any of us in the same position would have done the same thing because God gave us the gift of free will. The proof is in the fact that we have sinned, and therefore, we, too, have rejected God. Not only are we subject to the temptations of evil through free will, but we are also separated from God. Realizing our fallen state causes us to sorrow because our sinful nature has separated us from God. We come to the realization that when we sin, we reject the love God has offered us. We discard the goodness in which He originally created us. As we become more and more aware of the magnitude of our loss and of the holiness and goodness of God, our humility increases. We realize how gracious and loving God is. We desire God’s love. We begin to mourn our separation from God and long for the day when we will be reunited with Him in heaven, just as we long for the day we will be reunited with our loved ones. Even though we are separated from God, we can still experience His love. We are still convinced that God is with us, and He is. He exists in the realm of the eternal and lives within us through the Holy Spirit.
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