"On the contrary!" The Monk Arsenius objected. "I will pray to the Lord that He will completely erase your image from my memory!"

Depressed and dejected, the Roman woman returned to Alexandria and told her grief to the archbishop.

"Believe me, my child," he said, "that the elder prays and will pray for all of us, and for you as well..." But he guards his mind and heart from all distractions, so that he may live only in God with deepened love!

Finally, to love God with all one's strength, as Father John of Kronstadt says, "means to love not half-heartedly or lightly; when you have to fulfill any commandment, fulfill it with all diligence, to the point of sweat and blood and the state of life, if necessary, and not lazily and sluggishly or reluctantly."

To love God with all one's strength means to cling to Him with all the energy of one's will, so that no power can tear Him away, or, as the Apostle Paul says: Who shall separate us from the love of God: tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?... We overcome all this by the power of Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. VIII, 35, 37-39).

Here is one of an endless series of examples of a strong, Christian love for God that no power could overcome.

In Sebastia of the army, in the regiment of the voivode Agricola, there were forty Christian soldiers of the same rank, connected with each other by close friendship. When Licinius raised a great persecution against the Christians, soldiers were everywhere commanded to offer sacrifice to the gods. Forty friends also received this order.

"We will not offer sacrifices," they answered.

They were thrown into prison. A week passed, and the soldiers came out of prison to their deaths. The voivode gave orders to place the martyrs naked in the water of the lake. The lake was covered with thin ice. The martyrs, calling upon the name of God, immersed themselves up to their necks in icy water. And right there on the shore there was a bathhouse, from which steam poured onto the frozen water of the lake.

Terrible hours passed one after another. The water cut the poor body to pieces. Midnight has passed; The frost grew stronger. One of the martyrs, exhausted, came out of the water and came to the bathhouse, but as soon as his foot touched the threshold, he fell down dead. Seeing his death, the martyrs began to pray not that God would put an end to their torments, but that He would give them the strength to endure them. And the prayer was heard. A bright light, as if from the summer sun on a hot afternoon, shone over the lake. And this light whitened the frost. The ice was broken, and under the warming rays of the miraculous light the martyrs again became healthy and strong. The soldiers assigned to them were asleep. Only the prison guard was awake...

And then he saw the brilliant rays of unknown light and thirty-nine bright crowns descending on the heads of the martyrs and surrounding them with a rainbow radiance. "There were forty of them," he thought, then he remembered the apostate, and he wanted to replenish the retinue.

"I'm a Christian too!" he shouted and joined the martyrs.

In the morning they broke the legs of the martyrs, and then they collected their bodies on a huge pyre and burned them, and threw the bones into the river. And by the will of God, a bright light shone like a white star over their grave-river.

Nothing could separate them from the love of God!