The life of St Anthimos the Blind
Around the age of twenty he entered monastic life, spending a period at Mount Athos before turning to what became the shape of the rest of his life: years of missionary travel across the Greek mainland and islands undertaken despite, and in some sense through, his own blindness. He preached, cared for the sick, and founded a number of monasteries in the course of these journeys, and tradition holds that he once restored the sight of a blind woman through his prayers even as his own eyes remained permanently dark. Throughout these labors he kept an unusually severe personal discipline, eating little and sleeping on bare wood or the floor rather than any softer bed. In 1782, during one of his many sea crossings, he told the sailors accompanying him to change course for Kephalonia, saying that he understood it was no longer God's will for him to continue the mission he had undertaken but instead to return and die in his own monastery; he did so, falling ill soon after his return and gathering his spiritual children to him before the end.
