How to Love God with all Our Strength

This is what happened:  One day, at twilight, when I reached the main road, two men looking like soldiers caught up with me and demanded money.  When I told them that I had not a penny on me, they refused to believe me and shouted rudely:  "You are lying.  Pilgrims always collect plenty of money."

"What is the use of talking to him," said one of them, and he hit me on the head with his club with such force that I fell senseless to the ground.  How long I remained unconscious I do not know, but when I came to myself I was lying by the forest road, robbed.  My knapsack was gone from my back; only the cords which had fastened it, and which they had cut, remained.  Thank God! they had not taken my passport, for I kept it in my old cap, ready to show it at a moment's notice.  I rose, shedding bitter tears, not so much on account of the pain in my head as for the loss of the Bible and the Philokalia, which were in the stolen bag.

I did not cease to mourn and to wail day and night.  Where was my Bible, which I had carried with me all this time and read since my early youth?  Where was my Philokalia, which gave me so much enlightenment and consolation?  Alas, I had lost my first and last treasures in life without having enjoyed them fully.  It would have been better for me to have been killed on the spot, than to exist without spiritual food.  There was no way of replacing these books now. 

Heavily I dragged myself for two days, overcome by my calamity.  Exhausted at the end of the third day, I fell to the ground and went to sleep in the shelter of a bush.  And I had a dream.  I saw myself in the monastery cell of my elder, lamenting over my loss.  In his endeavor to console me the old man was saying:  "You must learn therefrom detachment from worldly things for your greater progress towards heaven.  All this has been allowed to come to pass so as to prevent you from slipping into mere enjoyment of spiritual sweetness...  God directs all events for the good of mankind, for 'he wills that all men should be saved.'  Be of good cheer and trust that along with the temptation God provides also a way of escape.  In a short time you will rejoice more than you grieve now."

As these words were spoken, I woke up, my strength returned and my soul was at peace, as though filled with the brightness of dawn.  "God's will be done," I said, and, crossing myself, got up and went on my way.  Once more the prayer was self-acting in my heart as it had been before, and I walked serenely for three days.

-The Way of a Pilgrim

The Way of a Pilgrim is a nineteenth-century spiritual classic by an anonymous Russian writer.