A Gift of Prayer
Saint Nicholas has long been turned to for assistance when faced with all manner of distress
 St. Nicholas Center Collection |
A Muslim woman in the Russian Republic of Bashkiria, who had been unsuccessfully treated for infertility for fourteen years, gave birth to a son after praying before the icon of St. Nicholas in an Orthodox church.
"I'm a Muslim, but for some reason I believed that it [the icon] would help me," the happy mother is quoted as saying by Ufa edition of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.
Her friends advised her to go to the church: her marriage had almost failed and the diagnosis sounded as a death verdict to family happiness—it is impossible to give birth with such disease.
It was the first time the woman came to the church, she was a little bit scared and did not know how to pray. Parishioners told her "sincerely, from the heart," ask St. Nicholas.
Then she invented a simple prayer: "Nicholas the Wonderworker, help me, give us a son, please . . ." Finally, the woman took off her favorite golden chain and left it near the icon—there is a belief that such gifts make a prayer more effective.
A month later she learned she was pregnant. Her son Tamerlan makes his parents happy: he is so cheerful and clever.
From Interfax, January 21, 2011.