Thursday of the First Week in Lent
In today’s first reading we meet a Jewish woman named Esther who is Queen of Persia. After learning her people were to be killed, she prepared to enter the presence of the king without permission —a move that risked her own life. Before she did this, she prayed to God to protect His people and to help give her courage to address the King. She lay prostrate upon the ground, together with her handmaids, from morning until evening knowing that her fate and the fate of her people were totally in God’s hands. She ultimately convinced the King to let her people defend themselves and the Jewish people survived.
Are we truly open with God in our prayer? Do we share with him our deepest struggles, joys, and needs? Today’s gospel from St. Matthew encourages us to ask, to search, and to knock as a way of acknowledging our total dependence on God. It may be hard to open our hearts, but whatever we ask for, like Esther, we leave the outcome totally in God’s hands. As Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, “Father, not my will but yours be done.”
As we continue our Lenten journey, it might be a good time to focus on seeking opportunities to be more open in our prayer lives, seeking God’s will. What concrete ways can we do this? Perhaps we can do a daily online retreat for a few minutes, or meditate on Stations of the Cross weekly, or perhaps offer a brief prayer each time we encounter the thing we are abstaining from. Today let us be truly open with God so we can be closer to Him.
-Jessica Gabrielli