Thursday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
As I spent time in prayer with today’s gospel, I was immediately drawn to St. Augustine’s famous words from his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” This restlessness has always been present in me, and usually I spend a lot of my time trying to find a way to get control of it. Yet, through the help of God’s grace, I aim to let go of this control so that I can experience glimpses of the rest that St. Augustine describes.
Jesus’s parable in today’s gospel is a lesson for our own prayer life. Jesus explains to his disciples that a man decided to walk to his neighbor’s house (at midnight!), knocked on his door and asked him for bread for a hungry visitor. The man was not met by a friend who was very eager to help. Can you blame him? He gave many excuses as to why he couldn’t provide what was needed. However, the man was rather persistent and did not give up on his request. He kept on knocking until the door opened. He kept on asking until he got an answer. He kept on seeking those three loaves of bread until he got them.
This passage directly follows Jesus’s teaching what we now know as Lord’s prayer to the apostles. He instructed them to pray with the words: “Father, hallowed be thy name, give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test”
(Luke 11: 2-4). This prayer, coupled with the parable in today’s gospel, taught the apostles what to pray and how they ought to pray. Just like the man who is impossibly persistent for loaves of bread, so too are we called to be persistent in our prayer with God. Sometimes we can forget to come to God with our needs, or feel our needs are insignificant, but the point Jesus is making is clear: God is always approachable and delights in the time we spend with Him.
Perhaps we may feel we have been knocking at God’s door for years in prayer and we may feel tired of asking for the same things. Today let us ask ourselves to be open to receiving what God has to offer us when he opens the door. Let us be thankful for the ways God shares the great gift of the Holy Spirit and His infinite love with us.
-Jessica Gabrielli