Wednesday, Fifth Week of Lent

WEDNESDAY, FIFTH WEEK OF LENT

Recognizing Prayer as Essential

If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. Daniel 3:17

The crucial question is whether you should pray always and whether your prayer is necessary. In one’s spiritual life, the stakes are all or nothing! If someone says that it’s good to turn to God in prayer for a spare minute, or if he grants that a person with a problem does well to take refuge in prayer, he has as much as admitted that praying is on the margin of life and that it doesn’t really matter. Whenever you feel that a little prayer can’t do any harm, you will find that it can’t do much good either. Prayer is prayer only when we can say that without it, a man or woman could not live.

Today, I will examine my conscience to see where prayer ranks in my life, and I will pray for the grace to make it more important – perhaps the most important thing in my life.

Henri J. M. Nouwen

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