....THINK AGAIN!
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| St. Augustine & St. Monica, pray for us. |
God always answers our prayers. Sometimes He says yes and sometimes He says no. God loves us so we can be sure when He says no that what we are asking for is not good for us.
When He says yes, sometimes He takes His own time. Abraham and Sarah prayed for a child. God told them, yes, not only would they have a child, but their descendants would be like the stars of the sky. But God made them wait...and wait...and wait.
Instead of trusting Him, they decided to take things into their own hands. Sarah convinced Abraham to have relations with her maid, Hagar. Ai yi yi! We all know how that ended and we're still suffering from the battle between Isaac and Ishmael today.
Maybe God delays fulfillment of His yes to help us grow in patience and perseverance. And sometimes, He rewards that patience and perseverance with an abundance we can hardly imagine. Let me share an excerpt from Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence about St. Monica and her sixteen-year prayer vigil for the conversion of her son, Augustine:
Once we have really understood just how far God's goodness extends we can never believe that we have been refused or that He wishes to deprive us of hope. Rather, the more He makes us keep on asking for something we want, the more confident we should feel that we shall eventually obtain it. We can begin to doubt that our prayer has been heard only when we notice we have stopped praying. If after a year we find that our prayer is as fervent as it was at the beginning, then we need not doubt about the success of our efforts, and instead of losing courage after so long a delay, we should rejoice because we can be certain that our desires will be all the more fully satisfied for the length of time we have prayed....
In fact it took St. Monica sixteen years to obtain the conversion of Augustine, but the conversion was entire and far beyond what she had prayed for. Her desire was that her son's incontinence might be checked by marriage, and instead she had the joy of seeing him embrace a life of holy chastity. She had only wanted him to be baptized and become a Christian, and she saw him a bishop. She asked God to turn him aside from heresy, and God made him a pillar of the Church and its champion against heretics.
Think what would have happened had she given up hope after a couple of years, after ten or twelve years, when her prayers appeared to obtain no result and her son grew worse instead of better, adding avarice and ambition to the wildness of his life and sinking further and further into error. She would have wronged her son, thrown away her own happiness, and deprived the world of one of the greatest Christian thinkers.
Have you been praying for something for a long time...something you know God wants as much as you do? Perhaps you're praying for a loved one to return to the faith or for your own victory over a vice or fault that seems impossible to overcome. Keep praying with the confidence that God hears you and will answer your prayer with a resounding yes!
Remember what the Lord said to St. Paul. "My grace is sufficient for you." What was the thorn that pricked him? We don't know. But we can be confident that God knew fighting against it would help St. Paul more than removing it. Adversity keeps us humble.
God loves each of us as if there were but one of us. When we act like we believe it, we rest in His Sacred Heart and take consolation in His love. And what a place to rest!
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.
Where does free will work in to this?
ReplyDeleteIf I pray & pray someone returns to the Church, that person has the free will to refuse God's grace to do so, correct?
God never violates free will, but prayer for ourselves and others bathes us in grace. St. Augustine always had free will. He used it to reject God for many years, but his mother kept on praying confident that God would fill Augustine with grace and eventually it would break his stony heart. The Blessed Mother said at Fatima that many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray for them. We need to never give up praying for even those who seem hopelessly chained by their sins. God's grace can melt the hardest heart -- but only if the soul is willing to respond. I have no doubt that Jesus and Mary prayed earnestly for Judas, but he used his free will to reject the Lord.
DeleteSo Mary's prayers for Judas received a "no" not because God decided and said no but because Judas refused to cooperate with grace and we know God never violates free will.
DeleteI bring this up because I always hear of petitioning God as a yes/no proposition and if we don't receive the desired answer we chalk it up to God doesn't want that for us. And we say God has a plan and reason for the no. But neglected in that is that often the object of our prayers has a part in it too and can reject grace!
Besides praying didn't Augustine's mother also try a few things to persuade him to change? Was that necessary to chip away at his heart so he would be receptive to God's grace?
Great questions to bring up with a well-formed priest. At the Mass we hear that Christ died "for the many." The many were all those who accepted His sacrifice and desired to be with Him in heaven. I believe God offered Judas all the graces necessary salvation. The Church doesn't teach that he's in hell, but it seems highly likely. I'm no authority, but I believe Judas was offered all the graces necessary to repent like Peter did, but refused those graces. If God viiolated our free will to force us to go to heaven, we would all be robots and what would be the point. Love isn't love if it isn't freely given.
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