Saint John (Maximovich) had the custom of visiting the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville once a year. On one visit, when he was already leaving the monastery, a monk gave him a note with the names of four seriously ill people. Vladyka John during the year received many thousands of such requests to pray. Arriving at the monastery the following year, he summoned this monk to him and, to the greatest astonishment of the latter, drew from the depths of his cassock that very note which had been shattered and torn.
— I prayed for your friends, said Vladyka John, but two of them are dead and the other two are well.
That’s what it was.
Neither time nor distance is a hindrance to spirituality.
Even at a distance, Saint John was able to share the concerns of his children. One of them, Father James (now the archbishop), the abbot of a small monastery in Holland, was sitting in his room, unable to sleep, anxious about something. Suddenly the phone rang in the middle of the night. The Lord John, who was hundreds of miles away, called:
— Go to sleep, and whatever you ask of God will come true.
St. John, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco
The Holy Land Charitable Foundation
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