Who is opening the doors for you?

When we seek to pray we often tempted to set the agenda and step out in faith. We seek to approach God as though we know everything and God knows nothing. We can seek to convince, cajole and influence God to seeing the world as we see it. We then become disappointed when God does not seem to pay attention to our heartfelt cries and our deepest need. At times when we are in our greatest need, we can behave as though God was deaf to our pleas by shouting louder for a result which will be rewarded for our intense effort. At times in the midst of this prayer, we can also sense a spirit of discouragement which can catch us unawares.

Yet we know that it is God who actually initiates and draws us into prayer in the first place. God seeks to draw us closer to the life which will fill our greatest desire. This is the reason why we need to keep on praying about the things that are important to us. By becoming aware of how they influence our lives we become more open to praying about them with a different level of intensity which invites us to surrender our lives to what God seeks to engage us with in life. This is not about a senseless banging our heads against a brick wall but rather a deeper longing for what will open the doors of faith to the grace God wishes to impart. It calls us to be encouraged in the lives we are already living which God is always aware of. God is not absent from us where we need to shout louder or work harder. God stands at our side in the person of Jesus seeing where he establishes a home amongst us. 

In this discovery, we find all creation is made new and God helps to experience a love which is not ethereal but is a revelation which draws us closer to Him. It leads us in a way of life which is holistic and holy. God is glorified in the lives we are called to live. No longer do we hold God at arm's length but allows us to open doors which have for too long seen Him as a stranger distant from our lands. Jesus helps us to know that God always abides with us and opens the whole of our life to his loving presence. Our life becomes a prayer and our prayer becomes our life.