Preparing the reflections was a very big task for me. I often felt stressed out as I feel that I am not equipped to write something that people will read or that I would be able to correctly showcase how reflections should be written.

After reading the First and Second readings and the Gospel repeatedly, trying to get inspiration, and procrastinating for weeks after weeks. I finally sat down and started on this reflection.

As I started, it was amazing to see how God is telling me that He is ever so patient with me, surrounding me with His presence, His love and His timely intervention in our lives.

God’s work is something that we simply cannot comprehend in full colour.

Many times, we load our own misconceptions onto God, giving Him our prejudices, our lack of trust. Our inner dialogue can be quite critical, especially when He doesn’t answer our prayers based on our timing and what we think we need.

However, the power of God forces us to simply stop, to trust, and to develop a relationship in which we concede that we are only humans and that He is omnipotent and omnipresent.

Much of our prayer is based on petition and it falls short of a good form of prayer. Prayer is a communication with our Lord. In prayer, we listen to him first. This is very often missing in our prayers. Then we can talk to him like we talk to anyone that we know so well. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to treat the Lord as Santa Claus – and our prayer tends to consist of giving him a wish list of what we want.

What does the Lord want for us? This is more important than what we would want for ourselves. Often we do not see this and when there is a delay in a reply from the Lord, we get angry or give up on him and stop praying.

The ‘delay’ from Jesus, is not necessarily a delay in the infinite eyes of God. We have to admit that we do not understand or know when He will answer our prayers. The key to living in the presence of God is to trust in his love, beyond our own understanding.

The other key, is to be persistent in prayer as well.

Written by

Cecilia Loh

Ministry of Lectors