Thursday, First Week of Lent

I am sure we have all had the experience of praying for something and our prayer is not answered. It can sometimes undermine our faith a little. Yet, in today’s gospel reading Jesus declares, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you’. We are to keep on asking, to keep on searching, to keep on knocking, and trusting that God will respond to us. Perhaps God will not answer our prayer in the way we have hoped. Saint Paul tells us in his second letter to the Corinthians that when he asked the Lord to be rid of what he calls his ‘thorn in the flesh’, God didn’t answer Paul’s prayer directly. He was left with his thorn in the flesh. However, Paul says that through his continual prayer he came to see that the Lord was answering his prayer in another way. Paul was convinced that his thorn in the flesh was making him weaker, undermining his ability to do the Lord’s work. Yet, Paul sensed in prayer that the Lord was saying to him that he was working all the more powerfully through Paul because of his thorn in the flesh. He heard the Lord say to him, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’. Our prayer of petition always opens us up more fully to what the Lord wants for our lives and in that sense our prayers never go unanswered. What the Lord wants to give us is always, in the words of today’s gospel reading, ‘good things’, everything that serves our present and ultimate good. Our prayer of petition disposes us to receive the good things the Lord wants to give us at that moment in our lives, because as Jesus said a little earlier in Matthew’s gospel, God knows what we need before we ask him.