Thursday of the First Week in Lent
Does God give us everything we pray for? That has never been my experience. But does God at least give us everything we need? I think that is closer to the truth. We can say with total confidence that God gives us all that we need to achieve our ultimate end: the salvation of our souls and everlasting joy in God’s friendship.
With truth in mind, we can expect that God would probably reject certain prayers if what we ask for would be an impediment to that end. This rejection is good news. It means that God loves us so much that God is more than willing not to give us something we want, even something we are convinced that we need. God knows us better than we know ourselves and knows when something is bad for us. God is the good father who would never “hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish.” If God doesn’t give us what we want, there’s a decent chance that we asked for a fish without realizing that the fish was, in fact, a snake all along.
So what might we do? We would do well to try to let our desires conform to God’s desires for us. This conformity isn’t so that we can “game the system” with prayer. Rather, the point is not to settle for anything less than what is truly best for us - and our salvation and everlasting joy is what is best for us. So let us pray for the gift that God would never deny. Let us pray for the grace to become saints. God would never reject that prayer; becoming saints is precisely what God wants most for us.