Agabus

“The Jesus Prayer is a sword that cuts through all the snares of the enemy.” - St. Cleopa Ilie

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state. Source: Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services

St. Methodius and St. Cyril are a great example for me: sometimes the work you need to do is an absolute grind and you have folks opposing you every step of the way. But you gotta keep on. “…pray to the Lord of all to strengthen all nations in Orthodoxy and unity of thought.”

This is the Church on Spilled Blood, and it’s even more beautiful in person. Every Orthodox Christian should come see this.

5th gear, wide open.

The Punic Port of Carthage, a crown jewel of the Mediterranean, now just a common suburb in modern Tunisia.

St Christopher, pray to God for us!

The Pillars of Hercules in Ceuta. A 7 meter-tall, 4‑ton bronze statue by Ginés Serrán Pagán, made in 2007 on the North African side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Wisdom 👊🏻

@Thomasdelvasto_ God help you. Never give up.

“Christ was born of a human being, the Panagia! Are we supposed to believe that His ancestors were monkeys? WHAT A BLASPHEMY! and those who support this theory don’t realize that they are blaspheming.” - St. Paisios

Saint Alexis Toth, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America, pray to God for us!

Just received terrible news that our priest is shutting down my catechumen fight club. To those who already placed wagers on the fights: sorry, I’m keeping the money To the catechumens: I may have stretched the truth that fight club was a prerequisite to baptism

Same sentiment in St. Paisios: Some university students arrived at my Kalyvi (hut) one day, loaded with books. They said, “Geronda, we are here to discuss the Old Testament with you. God permits knowledge, doesn’t He?” “What kind of knowledge do you mean?” I asked them. “Knowledge acquired with the mind?” “Yes,” they answered. “This kind of knowledge,” I replied, “will take you up to the moon, but will not lead you to God.” It is good to have the intellectual powers that take man to the moon costing billions of dollars in fuel expenses and so on, but it is better to have the spiritual powers that raise man to God, his ultimate destination, with only a bit of fuel, a mere dried piece of bread. Saint Paisios the Athonite, Spiritual counsels, I

A Saint who changed my life. Saint Seraphim Rose of Platina, CA. ☦️@dttwzine 💀

@gew984757 @noetic_healing Carnivorous dietary practices actually reduce visceral fat, inflammation, and much more

@noetic_healing Carnivore is such a meme diet. For people who never outgrew being a 5 year old who thinks "veggies are yucky".

Nah 1. Eat carnivore and fast on fast days of the church. Limit food during large fasts. 2. Make pilgrimage and make it hard 4. Drink holy water and eat blessed bread and get unction when sick 5. Homeschool 6. Learn to work with your hands 7. Build the church and non monastic spiritual communities

@benquivenit Cognitive dissonance

Checking up on a “moderate” RC trad website after a long absence

St. Seraphim of Platina pray to God for us!

First Liturgy in 90 years in historic Tatarstan village church orthochristian.com/177356.html The Holy Protection Church was originally built in 1884 with funds provided by Pavel Vasilyevich Shchetinkin, a first-guild merchant. The church was closed in 1936, and the building was sub...

All those that wanted to halt the joy - be gone. Kudos to @UOJ_America for getting it right. synod.com/synod/pdf/5epi…