On Sunday evening, the demoniac was brought to the church of St. Nicholas. A lot of people gathered there. The woman did not want to enter the church, the demon mooed, cursed, threatened to burn down the temple. The possessed woman was led into the temple and placed under the chandelier. Father John, holding a cross in his hands, read prayers from the service book for the expulsion of evil spirits. When he placed the cross on the woman's head, she began to shout: "Remove this hammer from my head. You're hurting me. I can't stand this hammer." At this time, all the gathered Christians made prostrations to the ground and prayed fervently.

The priest admonished: "Christians, be patient, we will destroy the demon." He asked the teacher to bring all the schoolchildren to church, who prayed together with everyone else and made prostrations. And so every day. The demon through the mouth of the possessed woman said to the children: "Children, get out of here, this nasty priest is deceiving you. His mouth stinks from fasting all the time. Go outside, your mother is waiting for you, who wants to give you a piece of bread with sugar" (that is, he tried to lure children into the street, seducing them with what they most dreamed of in those hungry times).

People from the surrounding villages also came to pray in the temple. Once the demon said to a man who entered through the possessed: "Oh, hello, my friend, it was you who did this and that. (And he began to name his sins). And you have come to pray to torment me?"

One evening, during a common prayer for the health of a demoniac woman, a parishioner said to his neighbor: "Be baptized correctly and reverently. How do you get baptized? Do you play the mandolin?" Immediately the voice of the possessed woman was heard: "Leave the person alone, he will cross himself normally."

One day the possessed woman began to shout: "Bring my friend, priest so-and-so." This priest served in one of the surrounding villages and led a very unvirtuous life. He did not dare to come to church.

The struggle to heal the woman continued. The demon who tormented the unfortunate woman told Father John that he was the leader of the demons. He entered the woman, because her brother, in a fit of anger, said to her: "May the demon possess you." Since then, she has become obsessed.

Father John had a hard time. The devil was screaming all the time, threatening to burn down the village and destroy the church.

"I will get out of this dog and enter your son or your daughter.

"You have no right to go anywhere else, your place is in the abyss.

A month passed. One evening, after a moleben, when everyone had gone home, Father John closed the door of the church, knelt before the icon of Christ, and with tears in his eyes began to pray for the liberation of the suffering soul from the unclean spirit. He prayed continuously from eight in the evening to three in the morning. When he returned home exhausted and went to bed, he heard a voice in a dream: "Father, the woman will be delivered from the demon at midnight from the thirty-ninth to the fortieth day."

And, indeed, on the fortieth day, the woman got rid of the unclean spirit that tormented her. She regained full health and lived for many more years.

Father John lived very poorly, because everything that was donated and given to him, he gave away. For the first Easter, spent by the priest in the village, he was given a goat with a small goat. A goat is for the Easter table, and a goat is to drink milk on days when there is no fasting. Father John, of course, did not leave himself a gift. He sold the animals, and with the proceeds he bought clothes for the village orphans, so that they too would rejoice on the day of the Resurrection of Christ.

In the room where Father John's family lived, there was almost nothing but two blankets donated by the residents of Scooter. He slept on one himself, and his children slept on the other. He spread a blanket on the floor and slept on one half of it, covering himself with the other.

Father was a great faster. During Great Lent, he did not eat oil for sixty days, so in the village the Forty Days were called "the sixties".