Our Guardian Angel rejoices over our good deeds and grieves when we do evil. We should try to live in such a way that the Angels may rejoice at our lives.
To avoid sin, one must know what the will of God is. This is what we learn from our conscience, and this is what we learn from the Holy Scriptures.
The person who always has a prayer on his lips and in his heart, coupled with repentance, is a difficult target for the evil powers because prayer protects him.
These are challenging times, but these are also times when you need to be attentive to yourself, so that political passions and human wisdom would not lead us astray from the path of the right faith. If we keep our faith pure, if we try to live by faith, God will send us peace and tranquility. However if we sink into the abyss of human passions, enmity, and confrontation, then, of course, we will stray from the Lord’s way, and it will not do any good.
The ability to tolerate one’s neighbor is the wisdom of life. One should perceive one’s neighbor as he is. Do you want him to be better? Pray for him. God can make him better. This is how Christian patience manifests itself.
Just as a person suffocates without air, so the soul without prayer becomes dead and insensitive.
(Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev in ‘Orthodox Life’)
Part 1

***Now and then we include a particularly thought provoking or inspiring excerpt not from one of our regular ‘Elders’***