11/09/2026
Stories of our Saint series
Part 29
Continued on from Part 28
**Memories of Saint John of Shanghai from his spiritual children**
~ Archpriest George Larin
After that day, I often visited him because listening to him was so fascinating. I usually came in the evenings — it got dark late in summer, so even after the service ended, it was still light outside. He would tell me various things, and I could never get enough of his answers to the numerous questions that troubled me at that time. For instance, I was very disturbed by Herod’s massacre of infants. There was a prophecy about it — and God, knowing everything, did not stop it. The bishop explained it to me like this: “Let’s think — if God had intervened and stopped the massacre, all those infants would have grown up and been Christ’s contemporaries during His earthly life. When He was led to be crucified, these young men would have been in Jerusalem shouting ‘Crucify Him!’ They would not have accepted Christ and would have ended up in hell. Now we honour them as martyrs, and they are all in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
And then I, still just a child, realised that God’s ways are indeed inscrutable. God does not interfere — He grants complete freedom to man, angel, and devil alike. People themselves choose voluntarily what they want to be. From then on, the bishop never ceased his spiritual care for me. He, an archbishop, always found time to answer the questions of a simple boy.
I found it very interesting to observe how he lived and conducted his services.
Source & credit: Obitel-minsk
