The entire family shared the same feelings, “a grieving family still trying to make sense of their loss… We felt estranged from Niko’s life, and my wife, Anna, deeply mourned the son she had been so close to and the grandchildren she would not have… We said that he was avoiding responsibility, that his spiritual father was making all his decisions, that he was running away instead of working to improve society. He was egocentric and selfish, we thought, dividing and ruining our family, not to mention condemning himself to a life of misery and insecurity. It ate away at us,” although knowing all this time that “even those who live in the world, who have children and hold jobs, are required to keep themselves in some sense apart from the world.”

“There can be no compromise. God was confronting us with this uncomfortable truth. The world is not and cannot be our home… Children… are given to their parents for a short time, that they may be raised up in the knowledge of God; after that, he summons each of them as he will. The duty of parents is not to prepare children to settle comfortably in the world, but to shepherd their souls, to prepare them to battle against the fallen anti-Christian world we live in…”

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