Recently, friends took me to an old friend of mine, I will call her Hope. We saw her three years ago. Hope is humanly very unhappy. At one time, the disease made her bones so fragile that almost every fall led to some kind of fracture. And then a malignant tumor to complete all the troubles… Her husband had already died by that time, the wife did not make any children, and almost no relatives remained. Hope was doomed to a lonely and painful death if she had not met a guest worker from Uzbekistan named Kamil. I don’t know what attracted Camil to Hope, but he, an elderly and lonely man, took care of this unfortunate woman. I knew Kamila well, he spent the whole season repairing the bell tower. I didn’t see the qualities in him that I learned later.
So, it was Kamil who told Nadezhda about the need to invite her to her father’s house, as our Uzbek builders called me.
“Father will pray and you will feel better,” he told Hope. — We have to pray, Nadia. I will pray to Allah and you will pray to Christ and He will help you.
Hope later told me how Camil had persuaded her to pray and how she found it difficult to overcome her disbelief and decide to talk to a priest. Before, she believed in nothing, licked her wounds alone and prepared to die. Everything in her life was tough and certain, and then suddenly some unreality.
So my friends brought me home to Hope. She knew I was going to ask her to take communion, and for that she had to at least not smoke in the morning, but of course she smoked a couple of cigarettes. I remember Camil fussing and being happy to welcome his father as a guest of honor in his home. Hope lay in bed with another fracture.
We found common language surprisingly easy. She worked all her life as a simple painter on construction sites, and I worked ten years as a worker on the railway. This may have brought us closer together. She thought she was going to see something from another world, and a hard worker like herself came along and we had a lot to talk about. I told her about Christ and His sufferings, and she told me about her pains.
In the end, I heard what I expected from her. She said she would like to believe in Christ and would probably become a Christian, but obviously not fate.
“Hope,” I replied, “if you really believe Him, He can keep you alive and put you on your feet.” But then you won’t leave the temple. If you are determined to do so, it will happen.” She promised.
Surprisingly, I think that Hope was healed by the faith of a Muslim guest worker. Her leg grew together immediately and the woman left the house without crutches for the first time in years. Then — more, she was removed from the register as a cancer patient. More than a year later, she walked around the city, visiting friends, but never found time to go to the temple next to her house.
How can you explain such ingratitude to the One who just magically gave you another chance at life? Of course, he gave not for the sake of television with its endless series and other nonsense, but for repentance. I knew her illness would come back. And so it happened: again, a hospital bed and a bunch of drugs.
Thank you for not leaving Camille — they’ve been living together for ten years. And in the first week of Lent, Hope was brought to our service. Again we talked to her about sin, again I prepared her for communion. She knew that she would take communion, knew that she needed to refrain from smoking at least in the morning, but, of course, she got high. I didn’t expect anything else, but I did admit to communion, because it might be her last chance to visit the temple.
He thought, “What if God gave her another chance?” Who knows, but for some reason I doubt…
Priest Alexander Dyachenko
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