Spiritual Message from Fr Yacoub:
The church doors at St Mark’s Church can be opened by entering a code on the keypad lock. We invite you to have the blessed experience of going there alone, maybe after sunset, and pouring yourself before God in His sanctuary. You will feel His presence and you’ll realise that you really visited God in His dwelling. You’ll have a deep feeling that I was with God.
The polite way of approaching God in this experience may be to follow the same steps of the agpeya. When we start praying with the agpeya, we start by giving glory to the Holy Trinity; then we say the Lord prayer “Our Father who art in heaven”; then we give thanks to the Lord for the many things that He has done for us , we remember this! Then we approach God in a feeling of repentance; we say “do I deserve to be here?”, “Can You, Lord, overlook my weakness and mistakes and accept me back to You as your son/daughter?” Then after that we praise God, we may even use psalms. Then the last segment will be for personal petitions ie my family, my hopes in Him. Then I worship, do a metania, kiss the floor of the sanctuary, and sit quietly in the presence of God in the dim light of the church – meditating on His love.