We have all heard the familiar Gospel passage exhorting us to persist in prayer: “Ask, and you shall receive. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and the door shall be opened.” Yet many of our prayers are not answered in the way we expect. Rather, through prayer we come to align our heart with the Heart of God. Yet how?
Friendship and the Holy Spirit
Two things strike me as I ponder this passage: friendship and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus relates to us the story of a man coming to his friend’s home and knocking at the door in order to request some bread from him. If we put ourselves in this situation, we realize that we would only take such liberty with a trusted friend. That is to say, friendship is the context in which we even allow ourselves to ask something of the other person. So too, God desires that we come to Him with our honest entreaties, as we would with a dear friend.
Secondly, the last verse of the passage offers a remarkable promise. Jesus declares that if even a man would get up to help his friend knocking at the door, “how much more [will] your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” Here, then, is where the promise of prayer is fulfilled. This is the gift in which our desires are aligned most completely with the generous Heart of God. Any time we beg for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, God grants it in abundance. The beautiful secret of prayer is that the closer we draw to the Lord, the more our heart is transformed into the one which desires precisely this Gift.
What does it look like when our will aligns completely with the will of God? When we really and truly desire what God has been waiting to pour out upon us?
Shared Joy
A recent experience with my ten-year-old son offered to me an icon of what this harmony might look like. As a lover of books, I have taken special efforts to pass on a love of good literature to him. For the past few months, we have been reading through the Little House on the Prairie series, and unexpectedly we have been captivated by its simple but deeply textured story.
When he was recently assigned a contemporary, less substantial book in school, I wondered whether he might lose his taste for the classic books we read at home. One night after we had read a chapter of Little House, I turned to him and said, “You know, after we finish this book, would you like to read something different?” He looked at me with a hint of worry in his face: “No…do you?”
It was in that moment that I realized he had already caught the love I was trying to foster in him. He loved this simple, realistic story as much as I did. Every night we conversed about the various movements and touches of beauty in what we’d read, and those conversations could only arise from a well-written book like this.
Hearts Aligned
I think that icon of our bedtime reading captures what it might look like when our desires and wishes finally line up with the Lord’s. He desires to give us the Holy Spirit, that living water which then bears fruit in our hearts, yet He will not force us. If, though, through regular and consistent friendship with the Lord we come to hunger for this Spirit and for nothing else, what joy ensues! Consider how it delights Him when we come to desire exactly the good things He longs to give us. Let us each bring to the Lord this longing that He transform our heart into one which beats in harmony with His, one ready to receive what He longs to give us. Come, Holy Spirit!
I have come to love the heart you have for God. I learn much from your reflections.
I said a prayer of thanksgiving to Our Lord thanking Him for inspiring your continued presence in this ministry.
Permit me to also thank you as well.