The life of St John the Dwarf
He became known above every other virtue for obedience. Church memory recalls that Pambo once handed him a dead, dry stick and told him to plant it and water it, and John did exactly that, carrying water some twelve miles for the task twice a day, without complaint or question, for three full years, until the stick took root and grew into a tree that bore fruit. Church tradition also remembers him giving counsel to the monk Arsenius, once tutor to an emperor's sons and by then himself given over to the desert life, though the sayings linking the two men are less firmly established than the story of the stick. After Pambo's death John was ordained a priest and became abbot of the community that had gathered around him. When raiders overran Scetis in 395 he fled east to Mount Colzim, near the Red Sea, and there he lived out the remainder of his life, remembered above all as a teacher of quiet, patient obedience.
