Is it so hard to get God to come to the door and open it and give you what you ask for? This question comes to mind as I read Jesus' parable as told in the gospel from Luke 11:5-13. After all, Jesus seems to be talking about persistence in prayer. Is not God always available? Surely there is no door between me and God? Are there only certain times of the day when God is happy to respond?
There is one good thing about this parable or image of God. God is my friend. Secondly, people do ask me to pray for them. So, when I pray to God my friend, I can sometimes be like someone coming to a friend in the middle of the night or at the most awkward time of day. But then, the parable seems to say that God may respond by saying, “This is the wrong time of day. I and my children have already gone to bed.” But maybe God does need to rest. Or maybe that’s how God comes across to me in this experience of prayer. He seems to take so long to answer! So, Jesus advises me not to give up. After all, Jesus himself spent long hours at night praying to his Father. Jesus also comes to the point of feeling like God had abandoned him. As he cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me!”
So, prayer demands a lot of faith. It is a refusal to give up even in the face of apparent abandonment. It is to believe that, even in my darkest moment, even in times of desperate need, God is there for me.
“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For the one who asks always receives; the one who searches always finds; the one who knocks will always have the door opened to him.”
Prayer, then, is an act of faith; prayer flows from faith. Are my prayers answered? Do I get what I ask for? To be honest, I don’t know. But what I’ve seen in life is that people of prayer have extraordinary courage in the face of danger; people of prayer are so loyal to their friends that they will do anything for them; people of prayer are amazingly honest when it comes to looking at their own lives and recognising their shortcomings. So, trust in the power of prayer not so much to get what you want but to be assured that you are never alone.
Fr Tom Rouse, Regional Counsellor Aotearoa/New Zealand.
