If you practice the Catholic faith and have a loving and living relationship with Jesus, various people in your life have prayed for you to be where you spiritually are.
Maybe your grandmother, your parents, a friend, or even a co-worker have been praying for you for years, asking the Lord to bless and lead you to Him.
I think of my grandparents and parents as the prayer warriors in my life, interceding to God for my vocation, health, holiness, and peace.
As a bishop, I am always moved by how many people tell me they pray for me on a daily basis. This knowledge is a great consolation.
You can pray for others
As you may know, the diocese and I are asking each of you to embrace the Walk with One initiative from the Eucharistic Revival during this season of Advent.
It is easy to do. Discern one person in your life who needs Jesus and the Church, pray for that individual, and then engage them in conversation, friendship, and support, as you seek to cultivate a faith response in them.
This effort, of course, is not a four-week process that finishes on Christmas. Rather, the Lord is inviting us to accompany and walk with someone into the future, going forward on the spiritual path that leads to Jesus.
Imagine if every single one of us brought one person back to the practice of the faith or to the Church for the first time!
We encourage you to pray for the person you have discerned to engage in this evangelizing effort.
That is why I started this column talking about the power of prayer in the lives of those around us.
We may ask ourselves why prayer for others is necessary or fruitful. God knows what we need and what He is going to do or allow. How can my little prayer make a difference to Him?
I certainly would not attempt to explain it, but it seems that the Lord, in His merciful good will, uses our loving intercession for others as a means to pour graces, blessings, and holiness on those we pray for.
And why not? Don’t all of us respond with greater generosity to a need when we are personally asked to intervene?
Our prayers for others, especially for their conversion and salvation, have efficacious value, even if we do not see the results right away.
Prayer is powerful
This holy season of Advent is a perfect time to enter more deeply into prayer.
Amidst the frenzied activity of the season, take some time each day to be absorbed in the silence and mystery of God.
Meditate on the Scripture readings for Mass that day, pray the Rosary and the Divine Mercy chaplet, worship the Lord in Eucharistic Adoration, or simply lift your heart to God in a wordless offering of self.
In the midst of that daily prayer, intercede for those you have promised to pray for, especially the person you have discerned in this Walk with One experience.
Imagine lifting that person to the Heart of Jesus. Ask the Lord to wrap him/her in His merciful embrace, to reveal His infinite love, to soften the heart, and to open the mind to hear the Good News that you want to share. Ask the Lord to bless this person with joy and peace today.
Prayer is a mysterious activity. We pray the Mass — the most perfect prayer there is — we offer devotional prayers, perhaps pray the Liturgy of the Hours, and some of us may meditate.
In all of those sacred actions, we can ask ourselves: What are we precisely doing? Our minds may wander during prayer. We can feel that God is not listening. We rarely get a direct response to our petitions. We may even wonder if this prayer effort is even worth it. All of us have felt these things.
Those who persevere in prayer, however, ultimately come to realize that God’s silence and mystery are the ultimate reality that we seek.
We cannot reach God or even grasp the awesomeness of His being. All we can do is dispose ourselves to the gift of His presence, seeking to unite our minds and hearts with His love and light, sitting in silence and vigilance for the divine visitation.
Most often, we may feel that nothing is happening on the surface. This lack of external movement, however, is not a bad thing or a cause of discouragement.
It means that God is acting so profoundly in our souls, speaking so deeply to our hearts, that we cannot fully possess or define the experience. God is acting within us at the core of our being.
Keep going back to prayer. The Lord will pour His holiness, peace, and grace into your heart so gradually that you will barely notice it, but you will over time if you don’t give up on regular prayer.
In the midst of that daily encounter with the Lord, keep lifting up those who you want to evangelize, those who need conversion, those who seem far from God and the Church.
Your prayer for them contains a fiery power and a transforming grace, for it is born of the Holy Spirit.
Pray also that the Lord will use you as His instrument, that you may speak His Word and mediate His love.
Let’s pray for each other this season with a renewed intensity, especially those whom we are seeking out and want to bring closer to Jesus.