When God speaks of himself in the book of Revelation, he says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."
But when that same book speaks of the beast, notice what it says: "...it was and is not and is to come."
The battle we fight in prayer is to meet the Holy Trinity in the present moment...not to let our minds drift to things past which oppress us, or things yet to come, which make us worry. Strictly speaking, neither the past nor the future exist. There is only the present, which God gives us to receive from his gracious hand as his creation...as redeemed by his blood...as filled by him who is everywhere present and fillest all things. It is false to say that the finite is not capable of the infinite; indeed, we find God here, and now, in this radically finite thing we call the present moment, or we find him nowhere. Here, too, we find the Theotokos and the saints: God is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him who says, "I am the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob."
"One hears that, in foreign lands, people are now learning to swim, lying on the floor, with the aid of equipment. In the same way, one can become a Catholic or Protestant without experiencing life at all--by reading books in one's study. But to become Orthodox, it is necessary to immerse oneself all at once in the very element of Orthodoxy, to begin living in an Orthodox way. There is no other way."--Fr. Pavel Florensky
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