Unanswered Prayers

By Anonymous -
How many times have we said, "Jesus, please, please, please grant me this", "Lord, please help this work, please give me it...", "God, please - I need this to work out", or even the famous last words of "Lord, if you'd only grant me this, I'd never ask for anything again"?

When we pray like this, it's as if we have just grabbed the steering wheel from Our Lord because we think that we can drive better than He can.  But can we?  Of course not.  It's so hard to let Him take full complete total control of our life.  When we surrender to him, we let go of all of our petty handrails and we take the jump.  Sometimes, it feels like we're falling.  It's frightening.  But if we try to plan our own lives, we enclose ourselves in a small cage.  If we give our lives to God, He will shatter the chains that we would have been tempted to cling to, and He will set us free.

We don't trust Him enough, do we?  Do we really believe that everything (every single thing in our lives, be it small or large) is part of the plan that He has prepared since the beginning of time?  If we really believed it, would we worry so much about our futures?
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I'll be the first to admit it - I've definitely struggled with this.  A LOT.  And you know what really, really helped me, almost more than anything (and Saint Alphonsus on the will of God)?  Just one sentence.  A simple saying.  "Ad majorem Dei gloriam."  "All for the greatest glory of God."  Really.  Isn't it galvanizing?  It really puts your life into perspective.  We're not on this world for our own happiness.  Really, we aren't.  And that's probably the first step towards detachment from the goods and the evils that this life will hurl at us.  I think it was Saint Augustine (yes, it was - City of God) who said that the good person whose eyes are focused on Heaven neither is beset by the plagues and disappointments and struggles of this life, and nor is he prideful and arrogant about the goods that are bestowed upon him.

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