Many people from around the world have kindly contributed to my parish of St. Herman of Alaska in Langley, B.C., helping us and saving us from financial catastrophe as we struggled to build a new church temple on our property, striving to overcome many unforeseen obstacles and problems. Recently we reached another architectural milestone, in that we finally, after many, many delays, crowned the building with a large cupola. The cupola weighed 6000 pounds, the maximum that the large crane could lift–actually, perhaps a bit more than the crane could lift, so that we all prayed hard for the final cupola installation and blessed it with Holy Water on the Sunday prior to the installation. When it finally sat atop the church (see inset), I felt a bit like Zerubbabel bringing the top stone of the Temple, and wanted to cry out with him, “Grace! Grace to it!” (Zechariah 4:7).
As a small token of gratitude I would like to share a video of ongoing construction project, a series of images accompanied by the singing of our church choir (and also that of another men’s Byzantine choir, singing the tropar and kontakion of St. Herman). The link to the video can be accessed here. Bless you and thank you for everything!
About Fr. Lawrence Farley
Fr. Lawrence serves as pastor of St. Herman's Orthodox Church in Langley, BC. He is also author of the Orthodox Bible Companion Series along with a number of other publications.