Ask

Who among us has not been strolling through the aisles in the grocery store only to come upon a young mother pushing a child in her grocery cart and witnessed the child asking insistently for one item or another?  Perhaps we have seen this scene in a restaurant where parents seem to be doing all they can not to appear frazzled while the children seated around them constantly cry out about one concern or another.  Do you feel sorry for the parents or for the children?  Do you remember a time when you too experienced such moments with your own children or grandchildren?

When a child is still young and innocent, requests of this sort are simple; they can be persistent and are not always timely, but they are made with complete earnestness and trust: they ask for love, they ask for drinks, they ask for food, they ask for protection, they even ask for play.  And they ask over and over again.

The first reading for this Mass presents Abraham who stands before the Lord and asks the same question over and over again (cf Gn 18:23-32), as though he might be a child asking his parent for a treat.  If Abraham could pray with such insistence, why is it that we somehow think that we cannot or should not ask in this way for the things we need?

Sometimes, we need to be reminded that we are also children, God's children.  We have a loving and generous Father who is waiting for us to ask, and he welcomes our persistence too.  Like parents who dream of the day when their children will grow up, our God looks forward to the day when we will come to him with our questions, our doubts and fears, our joys and our successes.  In the gospel passage today, Jesus taught his disciples to pray with simple words (cf Lk 11:1-4).  Let us never be afraid to speak these words in our own prayer, over and over again.  Our God loves us and wants to provide for us.  He has made us alive together with him (Col 2:13).  He wants us to be happy, he wants us to ask persistently, he wants us to live forever with him in heaven.