Gallows!!.

Do I need to tell the rest? Everything went on as I saw in this prophetic dream.

When I woke up, the boy was sleeping deeply, peacefully. Breathing was even, correct. His cheeks did not burn with the same fire. The fever was gone.

He began to recover quickly. And then the scenes I had seen in my dreams began to repeat themselves in real life. I even recognized faces. In the faces surrounding Kanechka, I remembered old acquaintances.

The terrible, tragic end was also known to me in advance... Sleep did not deceive me here either."

Kondraty Ryleev was really hanged.

Reading this story, one involuntarily thinks: was it worth praying so stubbornly, with such passionate persistence, only to survive an even heavier, more terrible grief and lead his son to such a joyless, terrible end?

But in moments of grief with one's short-sightedness, with ignorance of the future, one does not reckon with it. They do not think about this and stubbornly stand their ground, demanding the fulfillment of their desires.

It is by "demanding"... There are prayers when dry eyes, in which there are no tears, with some cruelty, almost hatred, bite into the icon, when the words fly out of the cramped chest, like abrupt words of command, angry, stubborn, when the hands are clenched into fists, and when a person looks not like a humble and submissive supplicant, but like a bold, importunate beggar who has decided to get his handout at all costs. And if this prayer is not fulfilled, murmuring and blasphemy begin...

A similar incident is told by the spiritual writer Evg. A villager.

In St. Petersburg, a rich aristocratic lady had a dangerously ill young son. Mother was in despair. As always happens, in a moment of grief I had to remember God. The unfortunate woman spent a terrible night in the bedroom of her little son. She prayed, but it was that passionate, impatient and stubborn prayer of people who rarely pray, when they do not ask God, but demand without humility. However, the prayer was heard. The boy survived, but the disease left its terrible mark on him: something happened to the poor child's brain, and he remained an imbecile half-idiot for the rest of his life. It turned out to be impossible to bring him up, to give him an education. They were embarrassed to keep the aristocratic society to which their parents belonged in St. Petersburg. The boy was sent to an estate, to a remote village, in order to hide him there from the eyes of St. Petersburg acquaintances. But in the village, when he grew up and became a young man, he became infatuated with his maid, an old, pockmarked woman, whom he married. What a blow for a proud aristocratic mother! To top it all off, the pockmarked wife taught her half-idiot husband to drink bitter. He soon became an incorrigible alcoholic and died of drunkenness.

And one involuntarily thinks: wouldn't it have been better for the boy to die in infancy, clean, innocent, not stained with the dirt of life? Would it not have been better to submit obediently to the will of God instead of stubbornly demanding its abolition and praying for the fulfillment of one's own irrational human desires? The Lord Himself, asking in the Gethsemane prayer that the cup of suffering would pass from Him, added: "However, not as I will, but as You... Thy will be done (Matt. XXVI, 39, 42).

For us, this is a lesson and a model of prayer. It is not possible to ask persistently for everything. In choosing the subject of prayer, discernment is necessary.

Persistently, without weakening, it is certainly possible to pray for purity of thoughts, for the moral correction of life; that the Lord would send down peace into a confused, irritated, restless heart; that He would draw to Himself and save those close to us who have strayed into the path of unrighteousness; About his own salvation: "By them weigh the fates, if I will, if I do not will, save me"; in general, about everything that serves the benefit of the soul.