WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT IT

6 October 2005
Thursday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time

WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT IT
Lk 11:5-13

When I was younger I used to wonder why we still need to beg from God the things we need when He is all-knowing and therefore always knows what we need even before we ask it from Him. As I grew up, I learned four reasons why we still have to pray even when God already knows what we need.

First, prayer is in itself our need. We need to pray. It is our direct line to God. It keeps our relationship with Him going and going deeper. We cannot live as we should without praying just as we cannot survive a day without God.

Second, prayer is not only asking God to give us what we need. We thank God, we praise Him, adore Him, glorify him, and apologize to Him, too, when we pray. If the content of our prayer is always and only petitions, then we really do not know how to pray.

Third, when we tell God what we need despite His already knowing it even before we confide to Him, we acknowledge God to be the source of what we need. We affirm God. Not that God needs our affirmation to be God; rather we need to affirm God to be who we are – His creatures.

Fourth, confiding to God what we need develops in us an attitude that makes us belong to His kingdom: childlike trust. As a child confidently tells his father what he needs so too should we have the faith to ask from God what we need. Prayer does not change God. Prayer changes us. It makes us children of so loving a Father.

Of course, telling God our Father what we need does not always mean that we get what we want. God is a Father, not a vending machine that gives exactly what we program it to deliver. God knows what is best for us and always does it for us. Because I have an adopted son, I know this very well. My little boy asks for many things and even tries convincing me that he really needs them. But for now, I know better than him. I am his “father”. What my little boy thinks he needs is not always what is best for him. I give him only the best. Later in life, he will understand better.

“Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened for you,” says the Lord. But we ask and receive not always what we ask; we seek and find not always what we seek; and we knock and the door that opens for us is not always what we knock on. Sometimes we understand why. Sometimes we don’t. Meanwhile, we continue praying because cannot live without it.