Jesus Alongside Me

We sit down to pray, and the whole day sits down with us.

There is the conversation we keep replaying, the work we have not finished, the person we are worried about. Before we have found a word for God, we have found a dozen things to ask Him.

Those needs belong in prayer. So does the person who carries them.

In All Is a Gift , we considered the freedom to serve God before our circumstances improve. Prayer gives that service its daily conversation. We bring Him the day we have, including what we cannot fix.

First loved

The First Letter of John puts God’s love before our answer. He has loved us first. Our love begins as a response. Yet we may feel we ought to arrive at prayer with better thoughts, a calmer mind, or something impressive to offer. The effort to become presentable can keep us from becoming honest.

We can begin where we are. We can thank Him for the help we received, admit the impatience we showed, or tell Him what frightens us. We can ask forgiveness for something we would prefer to explain away.

The Church teaches us how to make this offering. Thanksgiving, praise, and petition give us ways to turn toward God. We thank Him for His gifts. We praise Him for who He is. We ask for what we need, including the grace to change.

These prayers belong within the Church’s common life. At Mass, the Eucharist gathers the forms of prayer into Christ’s offering to the Father. Our personal prayer draws life from that communion.

Time with Him

We can take a short passage from the Gospel and give it our attention. Read it slowly. Notice what Jesus says, whom He addresses, and what His words ask of us. Return to a line that we hurried past.

The Catechism’s account of meditation makes room for imagination and emotion as well as thought. We may picture the scene, consider the people in it, and notice where it touches our own life. Scripture gives the prayer its ground. We need not invent a message and attribute it to God.

A few lines of Scripture can ask for our whole attention.

As we read, there may be something we want to say to Christ. Saint Ignatius calls this prayerful conversation a colloquy . We speak to Him with the honesty of a friend and the reverence of a servant. We can bring a failure, ask for help, or tell Him where we have been unwilling to follow.

Some prayer grows quiet. The Catechism describes contemplation as attention fixed on the Lord and a gift received in faith. We give Him time. We need not force a feeling or fill every silence. A dry or distracted day can be given to Him too; when our attention wanders, we can return.

We can ask plainly for relief. We can ask for someone else’s healing, for work, for courage, for an answer. Trust in prayer allows us to entrust those desires to the Father whose wisdom exceeds our own. We can keep asking while learning to receive an answer we would not have chosen.

The response is love

In John 15 , Jesus calls His disciples friends and commands them to love one another. His friendship carries the shape of His own love: a willingness to give one’s life for another. Prayer brings us closer to the One whose love asks us to follow Him.

That following has somewhere to begin. The person we interrupted may need us to listen. A task we have avoided may be ours to finish. Someone may need help that costs us a little of the time we hoped to keep.

The love we receive has work to do in the ordinary day.

We can leave prayer more willing to give that time. We can also leave without feeling much has happened and choose to give it anyway. The feelings are welcome when they come. The person before us needs our care.

Jesus alongside me. We can carry those words into the next conversation, the next duty, the next small opportunity to serve. The prayer continues in what we offer.