I learned about St. Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) when someone gave me his autobiography, I Came to Love Suffering. I was very ill at the time, and I was immediately struck by the title. How could anyone love suffering?
After reading the book, I realized you could come to love suffering, but only if you have a deep understanding that suffering is permitted for you by God and leads to the purification of your soul, as the Holy Hierarch himself believed. St. Luke also had great faith, inner humility, and an amazing love for God and man! It was this love that wouldn’t allow him to break down, but gave him the strength to live, and helped him endure truly inhuman sufferings—of which there were very many in his life: three exiles, eleven years of prisons, camps, hunger, beatings, and deprivations. But despite all this, he unceasingly confessed the name of Christ, and rendered constant medical assistance to all in need and conducted unending research.
I first felt St. Luke’s help when my mother was facing a difficult operation. I prayed to St. Luke before the operation, and I prayed during it. Of course, I also turned to other saints for help, but it was during prayer to St. Luke that my anxiety for my mother receded and I came to believe that everything would be fine—and so it was. The operation was successful, and her recovery period was surprisingly fast, despite my mother’s advanced age.
I had to turn to St. Luke of Crimea for help again recently. They suspected that my mother, who has been bedridden for almost four years, had dry gangrene. I asked St. Luke to help, and I asked other saints too. And fortunately this terrible diagnosis wasn’t confirmed, but it turned out to be another, not so terrible disorder.
At that time, by the providence of God, I saw a group dedicated to the saint on social media. I met a woman there who told me an amazing story about St. Luke helping her daughter:
My daughter was three when she got pneumonia for the third time and ended up in intensive care. The doctors did what they could, but she was getting worse not by the day, but by the hour. Her lungs were working at twenty percent, and we knew we were losing our child. Seeing this situation, we did the only thing that was possible and necessary to do in such a situation—we invited a priest for Communion and Unction. Batiushka communed our baby girl and gave her Unction. He was in the ICU for a very long time, and when he came out, he said with a smile: “Your daughter is healthy. Pray to St. Luke.”
The next day, the surgeons planned to do a lung biopsy, as it was clear from the earlier pictures that our baby’s lungs were rotting as when someone has tuberculosis. A consultation of doctors was gathered; they conferred for a long time and then our attending physician came out and said: “We don’t understand how this is happening, but your daughter has regained consciousness and there’s no fever.” The doctors took x-rays again, and what they saw shocked them: Our child’s lungs were restoring themselves right before their eyes!
Soon our daughter was transferred to a room. And when she got up for the first time in two weeks, she went to the nightstand where there was an icon of St. Luke and kissed it. Of course, she didn’t know anything about the saint, she didn’t know that a priest had come, because she was unconscious. But she later told us that she remembers how the grandpa from that same icon came to her.
Of course, after all these miraculous events, we went to St. Luke’s relics in Simferopol. And now, every time we’re in Crimea, we always visit “our grandpa,” as our daughter called him.
Here’s another amazing story of miraculous healing by the prayers of the saint:
Our baby’s eye had been suppurating since birth. Massages and drops didn’t help; his eyelashes were constantly wet and full of pus. He was scheduled for a surgery, but we didn’t lose hope that he would be healed without it. The whole time, I was anointing his eye with oil from the lampada at the relics of St. Luke. We already agreed to the operation, seeing that nothing was changing, but then suddenly his eye stopped oozing. Completely. It was a miracle. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Our child’s eye no longer troubled him.
And I read this story in the comments to an article and am including it here with the author’s permission:
My pregnancy coincided with a serious illness. The doctors insisted on an abortion, afraid the child would be born disabled. We prayed with the whole family, and friends and relatives prayed. We asked St. Luke for help, and the Holy Hierarch didn’t confound our hope—our son was born healthy. We named him Luke in honor of the saint. The doctors told us it was a true miracle!
And here’s the story of a child’s miraculous healing after a severe burn:
My one-and-a-half-year-old daughter had a third-degree burn on her chest. When we took her clothes off, the skin on her chest peeled off with her t-shirt. The ambulance came and took her to the hospital, and they said she needed a skin graft. They put on some bandages and scheduled an operation. We were praying to St. Luke of Crimea this whole time and then we took our daughter for Communion. Seeing an icon of the saint, she grabbed it with both hands and started smiling at it, hugging it, kissing it, and waving her arms about. Then we went back to the burn center. The surgeon took her away to get new bandages, when suddenly we saw him running out with our daughter in his arms, yelling: “That’s it, that’s it!” We didn’t know what he meant. All the medical personnel came running out to his cry, and he showed them the spot where the burn was and said: “The skin grew back itself!” He gave us our daughter, and not only did she have no scars, but there wasn’t even a trace, as if the skin had been replaced with new skin, only slightly pink. And there had been a deep depression and necrosis from one side. Thus the Holy Hierarch replaced my daughter’s skin and saved her from a graft!
And here’s another example of the saint’s miraculous healing of a burn:
A relative of mine got serious sunburns on his legs. After a moleben to St. Luke and many tears before an icon of the saint, the burns went away on the third day, leaving no trace at all.
I would like to finish with one more story of the holy doctor’s extraordinary healing of someone who was seriously ill:
With faith in a miracle and that the Holy Hierarch wouldn’t leave us in trouble, I took my husband to venerate the relics of St. Luke of Crimea after a severe stroke. My husband couldn’t walk on his own, and the doctors’ prognoses were no comfort. We couldn’t believe our eyes when the next day my husband was walking on large pebbles and boulders on the seashore on his own. And now he can even drive a car! It’s so simple and so difficult to understand what can be given to you according to your faith! St. Luke hears us and helps us.
