Orthodox Parables and Stories: St. Nicholas and the Coins

"I remember that it was six months after the arrest of my father, ”Vera Sidorova writes. "We really needed it, there was not a penny, there was a lot of debt. Mom sat on the bed and breast-fed three-month-old Serezha (the fifth child, who never saw his father), and I was doing something. Suddenly, my mother tells me: “Faith, look in the chest under the linen: maybe there was at least one bundle left by chance ...” “A bundle” we called a trifle twisted into a piece of paper that my father received for his service. In the bundles were both copper coins and silver. But I knew that in our only chest, where the linen was there was nothing left for a long time. I told my mother about this, but she objected to me: “You pray to St. Nikolas the Wonderworker. He is the patron of the Sidorov family, and you are a child, he will hear you better and maybe help us. Look for packages.” I silently prayed, opened the chest and began to rummage among our incredibly old and torn shirts and sheets. And suddenly, my heart is still contracting,  I shout to my mother “Package!” I unfold it. It has 20 penny coins! I start looking further and see: one, two, three bundles lie in the corners of the chest, and in each of them are not copper, but silver coins! Mom did not believe me when I shouted to her about it. After all, the chest had been broken several times in recent months, everything had been spent a long time ago ... “Vera, thank St. Nicholas,” my mother told me. I found seven packages."