Today is Oct. 10, Thursday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us one of his most famous teachings on prayer: “And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Lk 11:9-10).
I find these words of Jesus deeply consoling. The Lord is not going to abandon us. He’s going to hear our prayer. We will receive. We will find. And the door will be opened for us. We should pray with confidence then, because he will hear and answer us.
The problem is that we all have the experience of an unanswered prayer. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I prayed fervently for a golf cart. I wanted one desperately. Neither my father in heaven nor my father on earth saw fit to answer that prayer!
But was my prayer really unanswered? Hardly. The answer was simply no. It wasn’t what I needed at that time in my life. It wasn’t for the good of my soul or my salvation.
But learning to hear that answer is difficult. My friend Father John LoCoco shared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine: “The first and most important thing that I learned was how to shift my perspective about my time in prayer: I am not going to him, but he is coming to me.” How many times have we made our prayer about what we want first and foremost? How much better served would we be if we took Father LoCoco’s advice and remembered that “he is coming to us”?
Prayer is not a transaction. Whether we get the answer we want or not, the important thing is that we’ve come before God and opened our hearts to him.
A prayer for what we dare not ask:
Almighty ever-living God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpass the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit, God, for ever and ever.
My Daily Visitor spiritual reflections are a dose of daily Catholic inspiration from Our Sunday Visitor magazine.
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