Monday, April 25, 2011

persistence in prayer

Jesus said: " For everyone who asks, receives and he who seeks, finds, and to him who knocks, it will be opened. "
( Matthew 7:7 ff)

I stumbled across this paragraph:

" ...His point seems to be that the secret of prayer is persistence. Keep at it, keep speaking, and even if nothing comes, speak again and again. And finally the answer is given. It may not be the kind of answer we want - the kind of stopgap peace and the kind of easy security, the kind of end to loneliness that we are apt to pray for. Christ never promises peace in the sense of no more struggle and suffering. Instead, He helps us to struggle and suffer as He did, in love, for one another. Christ does not give us security in the sense of something in this world, some cause, some principle, some value, which is forever. Instead, He tells us that there is nothing in this world that is forever, all flesh is grass. He does not promise us unlonely lives. Instead of all these, the answer He gives, is Himself. If we go to Him for anything else, He may send us away empty or He may not. But if we go to Him for Himself, I believe that we go away always with this deepest of all our hungers filled."

( adapted from Frederick Buechner Listening to your life page 132)