Orthodox Parables and Stories: "Forty Day Liturgy"

Once, a worker, while digging with many others in the quarry gallery, moved a large rock with the result that the gallery collapsed, crushing everyone.
The wife of this worker, Mrs. Argyro, arranged with the village priest to do forty Liturgies for her husband's soul in a chapel near the place where the accident took place, because she believed that her husband was dead.

In fact, every day she brought a bottle of wine for the priest and lit a candle and arranged everything necessary for the Liturgy. When the priest arrived at the twenty Liturgies, the devil envied the reverence of Mrs. Argyros and after transforming into a well-known villager, he met her in the morning on the street and said to her: “Didn't you know? The priest did not go to church today, because he had an urgent job and that's why you don't bother. You're going to make your offer tomorrow! " The devil did this to her three times in forty days.

Meanwhile, a great effort was made to open the gallery to the mine, so that they could remove the corpses, which in the end were too many. They were all dead. It had already been 40 days. Digging even deeper, they reached a place where they heard a voice! A human voice telling them, “Watch out, I live! Dig carefully, because there are two stones on me, don't let them fall and kill me ".

They really admired it and, digging very carefully from the sides, they found the man alive. It was Mrs. Argyros' husband !!! Everyone wondered how this man lived so many days without food and without water!

And he, then, answered their question by saying: “Every day someone gave me, invisibly, I don't know how, a loaf of bread and a small container of wine, while a lighted candle was in front of me, and so I ate and drank. Except for three times, where I ate nothing, I saw no light, and I was very much anxious of my sins, because I thought that this invisible hand of God had stopped helping me. And I was ready to die of hunger and thirst. Then I saw the lighted candle again, and next to it the bread and wine, as before, and I glorified God who did not forsake me to the end, and so in this way I managed to survive! ”
Everyone praised God and especially Mrs. Argyro who lived this wonderful event in this way!