From the richness of his work as a Professor of Patristics and Early Church History, His Grace, Bishop Irenei offers us in this small but timely volume, as balm for the soul’s wounds, his reflections on the spiritual strength our Lord unfailingly gives us in times of struggle. “It is easy,” he writes, “to hear God’s words—My strength is made perfect in weakness—and take them to mean simply that when our strength is depleted, His manifests itself. That when we have no more power to carry on, God sustains us. These things are, of course, true, and they are beautiful and important; but they are not the real message of the Lord’s words to His Apostle. What the Lord opens to St. Paul is a deeper revelation: that in order for God’s power to be made perfect in a man, that man must become weak.... Then, in a life that is weakened of all its self-possessive fortitude, broken down into spiritual emptiness (often, precisely through physical trials), the Lord fills the heart with a strength that at last has room to reside there.”
