The today’s Gospel from Matthew 7:7-25 talks about praying and receiving. It starts with the famous line:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

I remeber how this passage puzzled me when I first heard it as a child. I did not need to be an adult and experience much to know that not all of what we ask in prayers become real. This was troubling because after all the experiences that I had with praying as a child, none of which had ever become real in my best recall, I would never expect to see something as direct and simple as this in the Bible. To my simple explanation at that time, when we hear something from the Bible, we have to see between the lines or there would be some sort of “fuzzy condition” for them to be applicable. Such as when Jesus teaches that faith as small as a mustard seed can even move a mountain (Matthew 17:20), but how to measure how large faith is, for just as soon as we start reasoning or waiting to to see if things happen the way we want, we fall right into the realm of doubtfulness. Anyway, people moving mountain by saying is not something you can see in our life, does it mean noone in the world has faith as large as a mustard seed?

So to the mind of a ten-year-old boy, surely there was more than just saying a prayer to make things happen, and Jesus shouldn’t just simply say it like that. It was quite a bother for me to take it in, but surprisingly the next part of the passage was quite making sense:

Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.

This I’d experienced at home everyday. I knew very much that Mom and Dad love me, but they just don’t simply give me everything that I wanted, and, sometimes, they even went as far as punishing me hard so that I learned my lesson and stopped doing bad things. The conclusion is so powerful. By comparing the father role of ours, imperfect earthy creatures, to that of the all-perfect all-loving God, the Father model of all fathers, it suddenly made sense to me. For the first time, God’s love wasn’t something abtract but just as what I’d been experiencing everyday.

The whole story now boils down to the one premise, that is if we accept God as our Heavenly beloved Father. For nothing happens out of God’s will and if God loves us like a Father to a child, nothing harmful could come our ways. That is to say when things do not happen (right away or at all) when we pray, they could be of less interest (at this moment or ever) for us.

Indeed, we all do that. We call God “our Father”. Yet do we truly believe and act like that? It turned out to me that by acting on this premise, by truly regard God as my Father, I was opened to a whole new life. I guess it how’s God works: He loves us from eternity but He does not force His way into our heart but waits patiently for us to respond. He shows us things along our life that would signify His presence and wait for our come back. And once you open your heart and start to look for Him, He’ll never leave you in the dark. That how the passage applied to me: it is not just about praying and receiving, it’s also about how seeking and finding the truth, knocking and being open to infinite love and grace. Once you open to God and accept Him as the premise of your life, you realize that “the power of prayer is the confidence that we are being guided and cared for, even when that guidance and care are not immediately apparent” Bishop Barron

Praying is not to persuade God or to inform Him something you need and He does not know. If you truly believe that God knows it all, you know that He knows you better than you do to yourself, He is “interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” higher than my highest and more inward than my innermost self (St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions III, 6, 11)). If you truly believe that God loves you as a Father to a child, you know that whatever you receive is the best for you at each moment of your life, and whatever you do not get is of less good or even harmful, even when they do not feel that way. When something unexpected comes across after a prayer, I would try to regard it as a gift in an usual wrapper. Everything is grace, and that means literally everything. The problem is that we usually don’t regard them so, unless they match to what we ask or for our visible benefit. So what I have been trying to do is trying to understand what God is telling me through it. It could be that I am asking for something that I am not ready for, and that it could bring harm to me or my souls at that moment, or maybe He’s preparing something even greater for me. Praying is not meant to change God, but rather ourselves, it’s “the raising of the mind and heart to God” (St. John Damascene, De fide orth. 3,24). Through prayers we get closer to God, to understand His plan for our life, to be like Him in daily life, and to love Him even more.

So if you are not receiving what you pray for, do not stop praying, but rather pray even more for you to make sense of what He gives you, like Mother Mary, she “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Then praise and thanks God for that, try to (again) pray more while holding onto the thought that it’s definitely the best for me, I just don’t see it now.