Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
When I was in sixth grade, I used to walk home from school with my older brother and younger sister. We didn’t live very far, but on hot days, walking home felt like a hike. In the spring, I had to stay after school for track practice, so my parents started picking me up because I had no one to walk with. On one particular day they forgot me, and without any way of calling them, I realized that I had to walk home by myself. I knew the way, it was straightforward through the streets of my very small, safe town, but I was terrified to be alone. Throughout this walk, I repeated the Our Father every step of the way, praying that God would protect me from any harm. Of course, I made it home completely safe and I don’t even remember where my parents were through all this, but I remember this walk so vividly because it’s my first memory of making an authentic prayer. The first time I saw God answer a prayer in real time.
Since then, I have made plenty of prayers and seen God answer them in the most radical, miraculous ways. I’ve prayed for friends, homes, conversions, virtues, jobs, healings, and seen God go above and beyond to provide me with something greater than I prayed for. And yet there are also prayers I remember making in my high school bedroom that He still hasn’t answered. It could be easy to forget those prayers, to assume they aren’t God’s will, but it could be braver to persist in these prayers and allow yourself to be disappointed again and again. To vocalize these prayers to the people around you and allow yourself to be humiliated when they don’t come to fruition. It causes us to question: why is my friend not healed? Why is my cousin still atheist? Why do I still struggle with these sins? It causes us to question but also causes us to wonder.
It is true that we don’t know the thoughts of God and we can’t answer these questions, but we can trust the thoughts of God and be in awe of them. That day I walked home, God answered my prayer for my physical well-being, but He also went above and beyond to seek out the well-being of my heart and soul. This is the will of God: to keep our hearts close to His and our souls on the path toward heaven. Every step I took was not just a step closer to my house, but a step closer to our true home, because I know that every word I spoke was heard by God and dwells in the depths of His heart. He craves the words we speak to Him and tries every opportunity to show us that He listens. But we are often the ones who give up and stop paying attention. Trust God’s timing. It’s not a matter of saying a prayer in a certain way or for a certain amount of days. There’s no number of prayers He’s waiting for, so why do we keep track? Why do we count the days until He answer a single prayer rather than live in these days where He is answering many? Is this not motivation and purpose enough to persist? Today’s Gospel is your encouragement to pray again. This time with expectation and hope.