Have you grown weary with praying and hoping? Sometimes prayers becomes boring when the mind begins to perceive it as a non-dynamic routine. When celebrating or participating actively at the Holy Mass, praying the Holy rosary and other prayers of the church becomes boring for you, then you are facing this problem. Also, Hoping for the response of God to our prayers can also be frustrating when the situations before us remain unchanged or changes to something that we don’t expect or like. All these happens to us because we are yet to understand Divine Time; we are yet to understand how God works! If you wish to know God’s time read slowly:
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven:
A time for giving birth,
a time for dying; a time for planting,
a time for uprooting what has been planted…
What does a man gain for the efforts that he makes? I contemplate the task that God gives mankind to labour at. All that He [God] does is apt for its time; but though He [God] has permitted man to consider time in its wholeness, man cannot comprehend the work of God from beginning to end.
POINTS FOR REFLECTION
1. The inability of understanding time in its wholeness; that is as something Divine and unchanging can affect your prayer life, your Faith and Hope as well.
I have taught before that because of the mysterious nature of time, it eludes us. Yes it eludes us because of our nature of reasoning as three-dimensional creatures limited by space. Hence we measure time by movement or changes, seasons, etc. We see time as something that changes and this can affect our prayer life by making us feel bored with continuous prayers! When we repeat one thing many times we sense some kind of boredom with the circular repetition. This natural boredom comes when our natural inclinations is at war with the Spirit that prays in us.
Remember always that prayer is a Spiritual activity that is done in physical. Prayer should begin from the Spirit (internal dispositon) and then should affect the physical life, and not the other way round. Hence when we sense boredom in praying it is the physical imposing itself on the Spirit which should not be so. Knowing the danger this could bring Christ admonishes his disciples to watch and pray that they may not fall into temptation, because the Spirit is willing but the body is weak (Matt. 26:41).
2. The inability to understanding Time in its wholeness can also affect your virtue of Hope which is a combination of the desire for something and expectation of receiving it. While faith functions with the intellect, hope is an act of the will that enables you to depend on God totally and pesevere. The ugly thoughts that make you feel you have prayed for “a long time” without response from God can blind you from seeing the handy work of God in your life and could also deafen you from hearing the voice of God that always call you to “do something” whenever there is a problem.
This thought of “delay” can lead you into depression, make you focus on the problems rather than on the solutions and possibilities around you. Remember that whatever you can do by yourself God will not do it for you! God provides the possibilities and solutions but we must respond by taking action or stepping into the opportinities set before us. Hence God asked Elijah twice: what are you doing here Elijah? (1Kings 19:9&13), but Elijah was preoccupied by his problems and kept complaining until God gave him a new mission. Jesus also asked Philip similar questions when they saw a hungry crowd before before them. He wanted to do something to solve the problem when he asked: “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” The bible says “He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.”
3. But we can unlock impossibilities with set-time prayers. Yes! But how you ask? There’s something profound about Set-Time prayers. It helps you to operate in divine time. It makes you understand time in its wholeness. It connects you to salvation and liberation, that is, what God has done for us through Jesus Christ His Son who by his incarnation and death entered into human obscure understanding of time and united our understanding of time as something mutable with eternal or immutable time (divine time). This is the mystery that happened: a timeless God was born in the person of Jesus who grew up, worked, died and resurrected in time (our understanding of time as days, year, season, etc) but after resurrection he operated in a dimension not limited by time. Hence he could enter into a closed room, hear the discussions of his apostles even when he is not physically present with them (John 20:24-29) and leaves is with his eternal presence when he says: I am with you always until the end of time (Matt.28:20).
4. God’s time is the best is not just a saying to spur hope, but an invitation to know God’s time. Only those praying and waiting on God with a holistic understanding of time prays and hears their response immediately. Yes I said immediately! Impossible cases have been wrought by these prayers, ugly situations have changed, testimonies abound only a trial will convince you. Only men and women of faith begin and end with testimonies because the “prayers it self must speak to you”, but the faint hearted and gullible ones hear nothing and see nothing because they are expecting magic!
TASK: What connects Human understanding of Time to God’s Time? Think! To see the answer click here to read: Matthew 8:5-13.
From that passage of Scripture you will notice that the two understanding of time: the time when the Centurion made the request (Physical time) and the Time of healing (God’s time) was made possible by the Word of God pronounced and accepted in Faith.
[If you want to start praying and start experiencing a turn around join me by downloading the DAILY SET-TIME PRAYER (PDF) guide in ENGLISH and ITALIAN languages]
▪︎Fr. SimOne Madu, OSJ
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Grazie PADRE interessante sto chiedendo allo Spirito Santo di farmi comprendere il tempo di Dio la preghiera dei salmi mi aiuta molto Mi tiene connessi con Dio sicuro che mi farà rivelazione continuate a pregate per noi,e noi per te ciao da TOMMASO LUISA Ruggiero e Rossella
This was really helpful padre SimOne. Thanks so much. God bless you dear padre.