More than Sorry

Real repentance is not "I am sorry I broke a rule." It is a complete reorientation of perspective that changes how you see everything. Our age desperately needs to learn the difference.

Fr. Barnabas Powell

Jul 24, 2026

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If you had to choose between self-esteem and self-awareness, which would you choose?

By the way, it is a trick question.

I remember when self-esteem became so very central to our educational process for children.

Public service announcements during Saturday morning cartoons. Special movies. Participation trophies just for showing up. Everything was well-intentioned. They really did mean well.

And then the Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in, and now we are dealing with the perpetual adolescence of generations of not-quite adults whose expectations are both childish and unrealistic. Our good intentions bore bad fruit.

How do we rescue society from this immaturity? It will not be with an equal and opposite fury of anger or political payback. The answer is an old one. We have to show our generations how to repent.

“O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you?”

And I am not talking about the “sorry I got caught” foolishness that only produces shame and guilt. I am talking about real repentance, the kind that changes perspective, which then changes how we live. The Greek word, metanoia, means a complete reorientation of the mind. Not “I am sorry I broke a rule.” Rather, “I am changing how I see everything.”

That is the medicine our age desperately needs. And today’s Gospel shows us exactly why.

At that time, the disciples asked Jesus, “Then why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?” He replied, “Elijah does come and he is to restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not know him, but did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of man will suffer at their hands.” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist. And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and kneeling before him said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.” And Jesus answered, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly.

Two moments in this passage. First, the disciples asking about Elijah, not yet understanding that St. John the Baptist was the Elijah who was to come. Second, a desperate father kneeling before the Lord because the disciples could not heal his son.

Both moments share the same diagnosis. A perspective too narrow, too temporary, too focused on the immediate to see what the eternal vision reveals.

What Can We Take From This?

First, the temporary perspective misses what is right in front of it, while the eternal perspective sees clearly.

“Elijah has already come, and they did not know him.”

The scribes had been waiting for the return of St. Elijah the Prophet before the Messiah could arrive. They were looking for the spectacular, the literal, the historically recognizable. And St. John the Baptist walked right past them in camel hair and locusts, crying repentance in the wilderness, and they missed him entirely.

This is what the temporary perspective does.

It looks for God in the form it expects and misses Him in the form He actually arrives. It is so fixed on its own categories that the living reality slips past unrecognized.

The eternal perspective is different. It has been formed by genuine metanoia, the ongoing lifestyle of reorientation of the mind toward God’s wisdom rather than our own assumptions.

When the mind has been genuinely reoriented, it develops a discernment that can see past the temporary to the eternal, past the obvious to the actual, past the expected form to the real presence.

This is one of the primary things the Normal Orthodox life is doing in us when it is working as it should. The liturgical calendar, the daily prayer, the fasting, the Eucharist, the Scripture, all of these are instruments of ongoing reorientation. They are training the mind to see from the eternal perspective rather than the temporary one. A person who has been faithfully formed by these disciplines starts to notice things others miss, the holiness in ordinary moments, the presence of God in unwelcome circumstances, the Elijah standing right there in the wilderness.

Next, inconsistency in the spiritual life is not a minor inconvenience. It actively obscures our vision and diminishes our capacity to help others.

The disciples had been given power to heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. And they could not help this father and his suffering son.

Why?

The Lord’s response tells us. “O faithless and perverse generation.” He is not speaking only about the scribes and the crowds. He is speaking to His own disciples, who have just failed to heal a boy they should have been able to help.

Losing humility always means a stumble. Perhaps their power waned as their pride rose. Perhaps they were distracted by the worries of life, the way I am when God’s grace is not my actual priority. Whatever the specific cause, the pattern is clear. When we drift from genuine, consistent, humble dependence on God, our capacity to be used by Him diminishes. And the people around us who need what we carry pay the price.

Our unfaithfulness cannot stop God’s mercy.

He heals the boy anyway. But it often prevents us from running to Christ for help on their behalf and on our own. The “automatic pilot” mentality of faith, going through the motions without genuine engagement, produces exactly this kind of spiritual inconsistency.

And it is exactly this that real repentance addresses.

Finally, genuine repentance requires two things that our self-esteem culture has never managed to hold together: humility and honesty.

Humility means I am self-aware enough to know I need to change the way I think and act. Honesty protects me from both self-righteousness and shame. Real metanoia holds both simultaneously. I know and love God enough to want to be close to Him, AND I know myself well enough to name the places in my life that are keeping me away from Him.

This is not “I am sorry I broke a rule.” That is the self-esteem generation’s version of repentance, driven by shame at being caught rather than genuine desire for transformation.

It produces the same guilt loop repeatedly without ever producing real change.

Real repentance is a change of perspective that changes how we live. And it requires what the self-esteem movement deliberately tried to avoid, the honest acknowledgment that I need to change, that my current perspective is distorted, that the temporary has been masquerading as the eternal in my own heart.

The disciples on the mountain had just witnessed the Transfiguration. The Lord’s glory had shone before them. St. Moses and St. Elijah had appeared. And they came down the mountain and could not heal a boy with a demon. The gap between the eternal vision they had just glimpsed and the faithless, perverse generation they returned to, including themselves, was the precise gap that real repentance is meant to close.

We are still in that gap.

And we are so blessed to be living in the moment before the awesome judgment seat of Christ, when there is still time to learn to repent and reorient our lives toward greater faithfulness and wholeness.

St. Christina the Great Martyr of Tyre

Today, we commemorate St. Christina the Great Martyr of Tyre, a young woman of the third century who was the daughter of a wealthy Roman official. When she came to faith in Christ and destroyed her father’s golden idols to give the gold to the poor, her own father had her tortured severely. She endured multiple forms of brutal torture under successive tormentors, refusing throughout to deny Christ, and was ultimately martyred by the sword.

St. Christina’s entire life is a portrait of the eternal perspective overcoming the temporary. Her father, her family, her social position, her physical safety, all of these were temporary. Christ was eternal. And once that reorientation took hold in her, no temporary threat could dislodge it.

She is the living answer to the question our passage raises. What does it look like when real metanoia has genuinely occurred? When the mind has been so thoroughly reoriented toward the eternal that even the immediate threat of torture and death cannot turn it back?

It looks like St. Christina of Tyre.

Your Response Today

Today, are there places where you have been operating on autopilot, going through the motions without genuine engagement? Are there people around you who need what you carry, and whose needs you cannot meet because your spiritual vision has narrowed to the temporary?

Name one specific area today where real metanoia is needed. Not the “sorry I got caught” version. The genuine change of perspective that will change how you live.

Then pray simply:

“Lord Jesus Christ, reorient my mind toward the eternal. Let repentance be not a momentary relief from guilt but a way of life that keeps my vision clear and my faithfulness consistent. And let me never go to sleep to my need for this ongoing turning toward You.”

Being Orthodox on Purpose means embracing real metanoia as the daily medicine that keeps our perspective eternal rather than temporary, our vision clear rather than obscured, and our faithfulness consistent rather than intermittent!

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Fr. Barnabas Powell is the parish priest at Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene Greek Orthodox Church in Cumming, GA. He is also the founder of Faith Encouraged Ministries and produces the Faith Encouraged Daily Devotional on Substack. Watch the Faith Encouraged YouTube Channel here - https://www.youtube.com/@FaithEncouragedTV