During Lent, the Church calls to take up three traditional practices, all of which are mentioned in the Gospel for Ash Wednesday: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Today, I’d like to focus on prayer.
Too often we tend to think of prayer as a chore or obligation, and one that we are not particularly good at keeping. Like flossing. You know, like when you go to the dentist and he asks if you’ve been flossing and so you feel guilty for not flossing, which inspires you to be better at flossing, but unfortunately it only lasts about two days and then the incentive wears off? Sometimes prayer can feel like that too.
And yet at the same time, we tend to wonder where God is in our lives and why He doesn’t make Himself known more. But how can we encounter God in our lives if we never make time for Him? That’s like expecting someone, to whom we never even talk, to solve all of our life problems. Perhaps we would take prayer more seriously if we understood it for what it truly is: our own personal time with the One Who alone can speak the words we so desperately need to hear, Who alone can answer the deepest questions of our hearts.
This Lent, may we try to see prayer not as one more item on our already over-crowded to-do list, but as the place we go to find strength and peace from our over-crowded to-do list. Not as another thing in our lives, but as the one thing our lives cannot be without. Basically, as something just a little more important than flossing...
Pax Vobiscum
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