Lk 11: 8-13 A Friend To Open the Door

Thursday of the Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

(Click here for readings)

By SOPHIE DRUFFNER

“And I tell you, ask and you will receive;

seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks, receives;
and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
What father among you would hand his son a snake
when he asks for a fish?
Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask him?”

“To the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

God must have been laughing when I got locked out of my room this weekend.

For two weeks, I’ve perpetually kept my key tied around astretchy elastic band around my wrist. But disastrously, I had taken my key off when I practiced the day before and left it in my violin case (a fatal decision that I would only discover later). And so, I was locked outside of my room, with every RA in the building gone and a violin lesson in an hour.

Even if I had knocked, the door would not have been open to me; alas, there was no one behind the door. An hour later, though, my roommate eventually came back, and I was able to run down to the music school, take a 30-minute lesson, and emerge from the lesson, still sweating, with time left to buy a pumpkin. God is so good.

Sometimes, it seems as if there is no one behind the door, and that God isn’t listening. But the actions of friends and their prayers for you can open the door and bring you the grace of God.

The Catholic Fish (the freshmen of University Catholic) have aGroupMe, which is the better version of the group text. At the beginning, we started praying Compline and Rosary together in the late hours of the night together, and our group has grown so strong. In the past week, members of the group have started putting prayer requests into the GroupMe, and because we’re praying with and for each other, we’re only getting stronger.

Prayer chains often arise only in times of crisis. But how much better would it be if we could pray with our friends all the time—“to pray without ceasing?” If we can pray together all the time, we can pray together at any time.

So get a group of your friends together and go get lunch. Then, after lunch, find a place to pray and say a decade of the Rosary. Or better yet, the whole Rosary (and good for you if you don’t get the Nicene creed and the Apostolic creed mixed up; the Fish are still working on that). Prayer is powerful, and sometimes, someone else has to open that door for you.