RE Verse reading–Luke 11:1-13; Luke 18:1-8 (day seven)
“Will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who CRY to him day and night?” (18:7) “And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down on the ground.” (Luke 22:44) Prayer, for Jesus, was a kind of death. Painful. Physically exhausting. It will be the same for us, I believe. A death to impatience as we wait on God, a death to pride as we depend on His power, a death to dishonesty as we openly confess our sins. I labor, sometimes, under the false expectation that the spiritual life should be convenient and easy, accessible even to the most casually interested applicant. It was not so for Jesus and unlikely to be so for those of us who love Him and want to share His Spirit. Easy? No. Powerful? Yes. “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life”–St. Francis
