The Year of Our Lord 2021 is officially in the books. For us at Orthodox Reflections, this was our first full year of publication. The site expanded substantially, and we wanted to pause and thank everyone involved. In 2021, the site added 326.1k new visitors compared to 2020. The most heavily read articles were written to help those seeking religious exemptions from the COVID jabs. Based on emails and traffic, it appears that many of the folks reading those posts were not, in fact, Orthodox Christians. They were just desperate folks looking for help. Quite a few indicated that interacting with Orthodox Reflections was their first exposure to Orthodoxy.
That fact alone should sum up what life was like in 2021. Imagine the potential for evangelism if our canonical, Orthodox bishops had been even a fraction braver?
Contributors published 171 articles in 2021 on an astounding variety of topics. However, if we had to sum up three lessons from 2021, they would be the same we have expounded on since our founding:
- Do not let secular governments control the Church. The last 18 months have taught power-hungry leaders that calling a crisis cancels even freedom of religion. Why would they ever stop? Compliance simply increases the demands. Even as the virus mutates towards becoming a common cold, new lockdowns, restrictions, and mandates are appearing at record speed. It is clear that in many places, the authoritarianism won’t stop until the compliance does.
- The world around us is deeply, deeply corrupt. From regulatory capture of government agencies to asset management companies owning the media and pharma companies at the same time – money and power are the focus and not the health and safety of the average working person or child. The current age is perhaps the most corrupt ever. Thank God for His enduring mercy in the face of such inhumanity.
- Fear of death is destroying life. People are terrified to die. So terrified, that they are willing to back any government intervention, take any drug, run from even the smallest risk, and possibly even abandon their very humanity to avoid it. Instead of preaching the Gospel in which Christ breaks down death by death, too many bishops and clergy embraced the fear of death and not its antidote. Imagine the possibilities if our best known bishops had spent 2021 preaching against the fear of death, instead of in favor of cloth masks on toddlers “just in case.”
Especially in Western countries, Orthodox Christians must learn to discern the world as it is. We must learn to move forward with clarity of vision, love and unity.
As we start the new year, we would like to thank all of the readers who have made Orthodox Reflections part of their lives. Thank you for reading and sharing what your contributors have to say.
We would also like to thank graphic artist Michael Lindsay. Michael did the most amazing job on a logo that we are currently using on social media. We’ll make it part of our site shortly. Michael was part of the recent Twitter purge and is in the military. He is hoping to build his graphic design business. He is a young, Orthodox man who needs our prayers and our support. If you could use his talents, or know someone who can, please contact him on Gab here.
We would also like to thank the following contributors who did so much this year. This is by no means everyone, but just a few who provided some of the most popular articles on the site:
- Cassandra St. John
- John Lee
- Irene Polidoulis
- Lawrence B. Wheeler
- Archpriest Geoffrey Korz
- Mihalis Papaconstantinou
- Irene – a clinical educator who provides invaluable insight to medical issues
There are over a dozen more, plus many advisors (clerical and lay). We want to thank each and every one of them for contending for the Kingdom of Christ.
We would also like to thank Manfred Meyer for his comments. His wealth of research enriches many of our articles. We have been blessed with many interesting and insightful comments in addition to his. They are always welcome, even when they challenge us. May the open dialogue continue in 2022. Across social media, we have just under 3k followers. Thanks to them for connecting with us, and thanks to the several volunteers who help manage our social media presence. Thanks also to the nearly 700 subscribers to our emails.
We would finally thank God for His guidance and compassion on all of us in this project.
To start off 2022, please remember to sign up for our upcoming Webinar on all things COVID – medical, moral, and legal issues will all be discussed. To get more information, please click here. To register, please click here. As part of this Webinar, and going forward, we will be trying to focus on ethical treatments as we are all now concerned about avoiding links to abortion.
Dear editors of Orthodox Reflections,
You are to be commended for the good work that you did in 2021. It is not everywhere that readers can find well-documented articles that tell the “rest of the story” about this overwrought pandemic. Thank you for all of the time and effort that you and your contributors put in for our enlightenment as Orthodox believers. Godspeed for your efforts in 2022.
Lawrence B. Wheeler
Why spend time looking for treatments for a ‘virus’ which has never been proven to exist? There is not a government or lab on earth that has an isolated sample of Sars-Cov2 from a sick person. This is the biggest joke of all. It’s all fake, a giant con, a psyop. And the perpetrators in this type of warfare knew exactly what the results would be. Almost everyone in ‘lockstep’. Most are now in a prison without bars. Solitary confinement is meant to be torture. The end goal is total control of all people and mass death.
Live your life in faith, without fear and other very negative emotions controlling you. These emotions can make a person very sick and end their life. Avoid as much as possible anything deemed to be toxic. This includes EMF, microwave energy. Pharmaceutical drugs and injections. Poison water and food such as GMO, slathered with herbicides and pesticides. Much could be said.
No doubt that people actually had URI’s. Since the PCR test can’t distinguish between the various viruses, they could have had all kinds of different ones. Turns out – it doesn’t matter. We have a wide variety of treatments for viral infections. The problem was the suppression of any treatment in order to prolong and worsen the “Pandemic”. Go home, get worse, when you turn blue, come in and get on a ventilator with a side-order of Remdesivir. There are many protocols, drugs, etc. that work for respiratory infections. Any of them is better than the CDC guidance and the jabs. Time to stop testing and simply treat symptoms the way we always have.
Amen.
To me, “Covid” = cold & flu season + purposely wrong protocols + fraudulent computer models + fraudulent tests + drug-induced euthanasia in nursing homes + never-ending media hype. From what I can tell, there may be a computer code for SARS-patented-something-or-other thrown in there somewhere, too. None of this justifies totalitarianism, however!
Happy new year!