The Arena · Father Josiah Trenham

Ask Father Josiah | Sleep Paralysis After Becoming Christian?

January 21, 2026·32 min·2 clips

A widower with infant twins asks Father Josiah for counsel after losing his 34-year-old wife to cancer.

The questions are heavy. Father Josiah starts with family estrangement: both spouses have lost contact with their mothers and still pray for mercy, even if reconciliation never happens in this life. He answers like a pastor, sympathetic to the trial but unwilling to flatten cruelty and distance into personal preference. Giving becomes the thread that holds the episode together. He turns to the teaching that it is more blessed to give, then pushes that through Christ, St. John, the Fathers, and the danger of storing things for oneself. Wealth is judged by what a person does with it. Married Christians, who cannot simply give everything away, are told that possessions are justified by use, not by accumulation. The counsel gets more ascetic from there. St. Nikolai Velimirovich becomes the example of the strange Christian riches of giving yourself away, where generosity can feel like receiving gold pieces again and again. Then Caleb writes from despair. Father Josiah rejects the idea that failed work, failed engagements, and depression mean a man has shamed God beyond forgiveness or become nothing. He names the thoughts plainly. They are satanic, not as a throwaway insult, but as pastoral clarity meant to separate Caleb from the accusation eating at him. The episode stays blunt about doctrine. Pain is not brushed aside, but false spiritual conclusions are challenged with the confidence that those thoughts do not come from God. The final counsel turns to widowhood. St. John Chrysostom's letter to a widow becomes the closing authority, giving grief a serious calling after death. The church is also merciful. Widows and widowers may marry again, especially when young children are involved, but the higher calling is still placed before the listener without scorn. The episode lands as sober catechesis. Practical questions become calls to prayer, giving, spiritual warfare, patristic memory, and a mercy that will not make peace with either sentimentality or despair.

As heard by us

Serious Orthodox counsel for family fracture, shame, giving, grief, and widowed endurance.

This episode moves from abusive parents and no-contact boundaries into shame, despair, Christian giving, and widowhood, and it does so with a broad frame that keeps widening each question into scripture, the fathers, and Orthodox counsel.

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Why you'd press play

If you want Orthodox counsel that meets pain without flinching, start here.

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