There was a priest standing by the side of the road, signaling for him to stop.

 I was once hosting a good young man from Piraeus. I will not mention exactly where he lived.

He drove a large delivery truck with a raised cab that transported food to supermarkets.

He explained to me, "I have to travel at night so the goods can be unloaded, stored, placed on the shelves, and be ready for customers when the supermarket opens in the morning."

So he always drove at night.

One night in February, around midnight, there was intense frost. There was only about half a meter of snow, but the cold had turned the snow on the road into solid ice.

He wanted to drive quickly, but he had to move very slowly because if anything suddenly appeared in front of him and he touched the brakes, the heavy truck would slide across the ice and crash into whatever stood ahead.

He said, "If I hadn't been driving so slowly, I never would have seen him."

There was a priest standing by the side of the road, signaling for him to stop.

"I was stunned," he said.

He stopped the truck and opened the door. The priest could not climb in because the cab was very high. So the driver leaned across from the passenger seat, grabbed him by the arm, and helped him inside.

As soon as the priest sat down, the young man laughed and said, "Father, where are you going at this hour of the night?"

The priest smiled and replied, "I live nearby. I could easily walk, but since I found a car, why not ride instead?"

They began talking.

"The priest was wonderful," the young man said. "He had a great sense of humor and kept making jokes."

After a while, the priest asked, "Do you have a spiritual father? Do you go to confession?"

The young man replied, "Please don't talk to me about priests. I can't stand them. If they were all like you, then I would go to confession."

The priest smiled again and said, "Very well. Then come to me."

The young man asked where he lived.

The priest looked around, opened the glove compartment, found a notepad, and began writing.

He wrote his full name, telephone number, and address, then handed the paper to the driver.

The young man glanced at it, saw the information, put it back into the glove compartment, and continued driving.

After a while, he noticed lights down below on the left.

The priest said, "This is where I live. Stop here and let me get out."

The young man worried that the elderly priest, who appeared to be over eighty years old, might slip on the icy road and break a bone.

He offered to drive him all the way home.

The priest laughed and said, "Don't worry. From here I can go by myself."

The priest got out of the truck.

The driver waited until he crossed in front of the headlights. The priest blessed him, crossed the road, and walked downhill into the darkness.

The young man continued his deliveries.

February passed, then March, April, May, June, July, August, and finally September.

In September he suddenly remembered the priest.

He found the paper in the glove compartment and decided to visit him.

The address led him to a women's monastery near Athens.

He handed the note to one of the nuns and said, "Please let Father know that he invited me to come and make my confession."

The nuns asked him to wait while they informed the priest.

He went into the church to pray and then returned outside, expecting the priest to appear.

Instead, several nuns came out holding the paper.

They asked him, "When did he give you this?"

He answered, "In February."

They asked, "Which February?"

He thought to himself, "What a strange question."

He replied, "This past February."

The nuns immediately burst into tears. They crossed themselves and began crying.

They told him that the priest whose name was written on the paper was Saint Porphyrios.

He had died five years earlier.

The young man had never even heard the name "Porphyrios."

He said, "How could I possibly have known his surname? We talked for an entire hour. I wasn't asleep. You cannot drive a truck like that while dreaming."

He added, "The handwriting on the paper isn't mine."

How could he have known Saint Porphyrios' surname when it was written on the paper? Even among people who know Saint Porphyrios, many do not know his family name.

The handwriting was not his own.

That is why the young man knew that someone who had died five years earlier was still alive, could see him, and could spend an entire hour talking with him.

He did not know how it happened.

But he knew that it happened because he experienced it himself.

That is why I said earlier that the human mind cannot understand everything.

There are many things beyond our understanding.

We accept them because we know them through experience.

That, the speaker concludes, is not merely faith—it is knowledge.