On Earth, we only learn to live

“Having experienced everything bad, people need to help. I know the taste of grief, learned to sympathize with my neighbors, understand someone else"s sorrow. In sorrows-current and future-we must especially learn to love neighbors, ”writes 90-year-old Archpriest Valentin Biryukov from the city of Berdsk in the Novosibirsk region in his book“ On Earth, we are only learning to live ”. He himself suffered such sorrow that not everyone will fall out. And now he wants to substitute the pastoral shoulder stumbling, uncertain, discouraged, weak in faith, to guess sorrows and facilitate it. Father Valentin Biryukov and in the advanced years retained the children"s faith, remained open with a pure heart and God and people. You feel the simplicity of faith with your heart, reading the ingenuous, at first glance, the stories of Archpriest Valentine - stories, as he calls them, to save the soul. But through these - sometimes ordinary, sometimes amazing - the great love of God pours out stories on us. Father Valentine has a special gift - to guess in other people the simplicity of the faith characteristic of him himself, to explain the most confusing things with an ingenuous pure heart. Not being a theologian, he finds the right words for the Protestant, and for an awesome sinner, and for a highly humble atheist. And these words often touch the soul, because they are said from the depths of a surprisingly believing and loving heart. In all stories he told, there is a desire of the soul for the kingdom of heaven, his tireless search for him. Therefore, in stories and the most grave sorrows do not fade away hope and hope for God. Archpriest Valentin Biryukov was born on July 4, 1922 in the Altai Territory. His father Jacob was an elementary school teacher and sang a church choir. During the years of collectivization, the family suffered trouble: his father was imprisoned, and his wife and children were evicted in the Siberian wilderness, literally in a clean field. But together with other fellow villagers, they not only survived during severe persecution, but also built a new village from Zero. The Lord kept young Valentine during the Great Patriotic War, where he participated in the defense and liberation of Leningrad. He was seriously wounded. After returning home, Valentine worked as a storekeeper and sang in the church choir, and in the 1960s he became a priest. He witnessed many amazing cases of the mercy of God to people, he was predicted about the Barnaul miracle of the healing of Claudia Ustyuzhanina. Three of his sons became priests. In the summer of 2017 about. Valentine was tonsured in hieromonks with the name Joseph. Despite the advanced age, being at rest, he continued to serve and lead numerous spiritual children in his hometown of Berdsk for many years. On April 18, 2018, Hieromonk Joseph went to the Lord and was buried near the Sretensky Church. The book “On Earth We only learn to live”, first published in our publishing house in 2004, became loved by hundreds of thousands of readers