It's that day again. In time for the manufactured feast day of Luke of Crimea, this anecdote appeared.
Note how, in the words of the MP priest Fr Dmitry Torshin, the tale is tailored to make Abp Luke appear a real saint and the doer of miracles equivalent to the marvels of competitor Rocor's St John Maximovitch. It's an obvious marketing campaign :
"I have a friend. He’s an athlete and trainer and also a deeply religious person. His whole conscious life he has unswervingly read the morning and evening prayers and regularly had recourse to the Church Sacraments.
Once, having gone to the south, he relaxed, and his spiritual composure cracked there. One evening he and some friends had a good time at dinner and when it came time for sleep, my friend had no strength for prayer. It was very unusual for him to go to bed without prayer. Falling asleep, he thought: See, I didn’t pray and nothing bad happened, so it’s entirely possible to not pray sometimes, if I’m tired… No big deal!
When he woke up, he felt a strong pain in his back and couldn’t move. They called the ambulance, they took him to the hospital and diagnosed him with a hernia of the cervical spine, about half an inch in size. A hernia a quarter of an inch is already considered reason for an operation, and he had one so large, and in such a dangerous place.
Fearing the unprofessionalism of the local doctors, he headed to Moscow with great difficulty, where they confirmed his diagnosis in a serious capital city clinic and started to prepare for surgery. They warned him that the chances of success were 50/50, but in any case, even in the most successful outcome, he was guaranteed a disability.
In addition, his left hand began to wither and nearly stopped working. As his whole life was connected with movement, it was an even greater tragedy for him than for an ordinary person, and he was in despair.
At the same time, he immediately identified for himself the cause of his sudden misfortune, and it instilled him with hope. Spiritual causes can be corrected by spiritual action: prayer and repentance. He left the hospital himself, took, we can say, a pause, and began to repent and zealously pray, especially asking St. Luke of Crimea for help.
Then the pain suddenly retreated, but a few days later his head hurt (it later turned out it was providential). He was afraid his situation had worsened, so he immediately went to the hospital where they did an MRI. The doctor came out with the picture and asked with surprise: “Can you clarify: What is your complaint and what did you come to us with?”
When the patient started to tell about his diagnosis, given, by the way, in the same clinic, the doctor was even more surprised and said: “You don’t have a hernia! There is a scar on the vertebra you’re talking about, but it seems very old—about five years.”
When my friend showed him the pictures taken two weeks prior, the doctor gathered a consultation that ended with a shrug. One of the clinic’s most authoritative specialists stated the conclusion: “In principle, practice shows that nothing is impossible, but what happened with you is highly unlikely, and unfortunately, we have no hypotheses about it.”
http://orthochristian.com/121712.html