Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
If the Church is a hospital, I have begun to think of OCPM as being the Emergency Room. Let me explain.
Recently, I spoke to a woman whose husband had committed a serious crime. When she learned about the crime, she was absolutely shattered and afraid. She felt she really didn’t know the person she had been living with. In her crisis, she began to pray, and in the midst of her prayer, she had a vision of her husband on an operating table with his chest open to a team of doctors and nurses standing over him. To her the message was clear: the Lord was saying, “Look at what I’m working with here. This man is sick. He needs the most invasive, intense treatment.”
Her husband needed to go to the spiritual Emergency Room, and we were ready to serve him, as we are always serving people in their most dire circumstances.
However, there is one major difference between OCPM and a hospital Emergency Room. In a normal hospital, there is a triage process by which doctors determine the most efficient way to help the most people. This means two things: those who are most likely to heal will be treated first, and those who are least likely to heal, those in the worst condition, will be treated last, if at all.
As the Emergency Room of the Orthodox Church, Christ asks OCPM to do just the opposite. We are called to heal first those in the worst conditions. No matter what a person has done to their community, to their families, or to themselves, no one is worth abandoning. No one is too far gone to heal.
The farther a person has gone away, the farther Christ asks us to go in search of them. “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?” (Luke 15:3-7)
At OCPM we believe in going after those who have gone astray. Your support has enabled us not only to continue serving those already in our care, already on the operating table of the Church, so to speak, but to seek out others in dire need of healing. We have invested an incredible amount of our resources in locating and maintaining relationships with our brothers and sisters in prison. In 2024, this was true more than ever, as we opened 236 case files of new people in prison seeking the Church, the highest annual increase we’ve ever had.
But there is still so much more to do. I ask you to continue to join us on this journey, as our Church hospital cannot be fully functioning unless Her ER is operating well.