We get a lot of questions from people that don't know they they just don't know where to start.

Mostly is are you hot in there?

Most people don't realize that Other Christian groups have nuns, not just the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox being one, Episcopalians, Anglicans being another.

Lutherans even have nuns and throughout the world, the other different religious groups have nuns and monks.

Each monastery has its own set of rules and is usually independent and supports themselves independently.

We, support ourselves with candle making, but the primary purpose of most monasteries is prayer and hospitality.

Prayer and hospitality is needed all over.

In a lot of the, older countries The monasteries have hundreds in them, and those countries are smaller than some of our states, you know, so we don't need a big place.

We need monasteries all over.

So that there are places for people to find prayer and hospitality, Coming to a monastery to visit, to sit somewhere in the woods or in a chapel and to pray or even to, ask spiritual questions or just have a place to draw a side and leave their technology outside.

That's very hard for a lot of people.

Now, I didn't realize it, but my family, They tell me you always wanted to be a nun when you were a little kid.

I didn't know that.

You know, I didn't remember that.

But it seems to have been part of my life now, in my 80s.

I say, God, you really didn't give me a choice.

I mean, obviously, all the things now that I look back on that have happened, kept me and protected me from not doing what some of these people were doing today, so God protects and God designs.

And here I am, 66 years later, 84 years of life that I've loved the whole time.

candle making is a very reflective, quiet, work.

Also, I do a lot of praying for individual people while I'm doing candles.

One of the things is having a being a math teacher, I tend to have to count and counting works towards a nice rhythm.

And so for instance it takes nine dips to get a candle and I have to do one run and then the second run and each run has eight frames in it.

And so I can pray a different prayer for each run that I know.

And everybody does a different thing.

Whatever works for your keeping in touch with God.

58 00:04:05,745 --> 00:04:07,046 work is prayer.

Prayer is work.

So we do we have work and we have prayer.

You think of as a lot of time in prayer when you work, you pray, when you're talking with someone, you pray when you actually just pray, you pray.

You carry God in your heart, you always center On Jesus.

It's all the time.

It's not just formal prayer.

At no other time, have I known that the world needed a prayer more than now, that needed a witness, a visible witness.

I'm the one that does procurement.

And when I go out shopping I get asked by people.

Will you pray with me?

Will you pray for me or my son or my daughter or whomever?

Would you pray for them?

And, I'll come back with a short list and add them to our prayers, because it's so important to raise everybody up in prayer, and it's so important To know that in God's way, he loves all of us and works with all of us exactly where we're at and calls us to himself in the way that we can walk For me it was just a gentle calling that started, when I was seven.

I didn't know what to do with it.

And then at 19, I found Orthodoxy, and, at 34, I became a nun.

And it's been 36 years.

it's a good life.

It's a challenging life.

I wouldn't trade it.

we hope God sends women to this monastery to continue the work.

the idea is that, You build as you can when you have the money and you build well, and you try not to go the cheapest route or the most expensive somewhere in the middle, building we have will have chapel, which it already does, and eventually we'll have 19 bedrooms, which we call cells.

But they're 19 bedrooms and that will be what the monastery will be.

And this double wide trailer where we're at will become the guest house.

and whatever the talents of whomever comes, that's how we'll earn our living.

And some people gravitate to me, and some people will gravitate to Mother Helena for advice and direction and just to be a shining light Just to say there is an alternative to the way things are done in this world.