Perseverance in prayer will expand our hearts, make us patient and more loving towards God and each other

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I am sorry to hear that.
Spend some time before the Blessed Sacrament as that is a remedy for anything. The moral of this parable is not giving up even if you feel like you are getting nowhere. Ask for these graces (endurance, patience, courage strength, longevity etc.) and next time you go to confession, confess these feelings and a lack of patience so that you can obtain the graces to help you overcome them. God bless you
 
And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?’
God knows his own. Some people have no faith and yet expect miracles from every prayer.
 
Done that for a while now and nothing. I guess I’m not chosen. I must be one of those trying to get in some other way as Jesus said.
 
Persistence in prayer should not be frantic or trying to force the hand of God.

It has to be balanced with “Thy will be done” and thankfulness in all things.
 
The problem there is not knowing why God is saying no. Some of us are strong enough to persevere and some of us are not.

Also, why persevere if the answer is going to be no anyway?
 
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Nelka said:
The problem there is not knowing why God is saying no.
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Yes. Very hard. And you can go mad trying to poke around outside God’s will for your life.

If you know you’ve done everything you can to fix the situation, (learned and practiced the social skills, the job skills, the money skills, the adulting skills) then you need to learn how to surrender your life to God, to trust in him, to lean into His will, and I can assure you it will be the hardest thing you ever do.

I’ve come to believe that our culture has really set us up to think that suffering is outside the norm. Self-help culture trains us to look out for Number One, promises that if we think the Right Thoughts, good things are guaranteed to us, but that’s simply not the case. People really do suffer in this world. Suffering is actually the norm, and philosophy teaches us how to live well in suffering, and religion give us meaning to our suffering.
 
Nelka said:
There is no meaning to suffering.
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Says you.

Jesus suffered everything we do. And I all too frequently forget to thank him for it.
In our broken world we can turn suffering into grace. It can make us more compassionate. Or inspire us to make our world a better place. Or strip away the extraneous nonsense from our lives and make us other-focused.

The grain of wheat has to be crushed before it can be made into bread.

But we have to make the decision what we’re going to do with the suffering that inevitably falls on us.

It’s okay to cry, you know. It’s okay to be angry at injustice and it’s okay to scream when your hurt.
And then you have to decide how you’re going to turn suffering into grace.
 
An example.

I have prayed the efficacious novena to the sacred heart every day for 17 years, this is my daily prayer. (St Pio prayed this everyday). For the majority of it I have prayed for the grace of humility, charity, chastity (as it states in the prayer to ask for a grace), and yet I am no more humble, charitable or chaste than I was back then.

That is over 6,000 days of prayer. Should I still persevere?
 
Obviously the answer is yes, you need to persevere.
But also make sure you’re really submitting yourself to God’s will, and not some idea of how you think it should look.

For instance, maybe I wake up and have an absolutely lovely plan of the Weekday Mass I’m going to go to and all the novenas and pretty prayers I’m gonna say, and how I’m going to meditate my way into a serene head-space and then I’m gonna head over to the soup kitchen on my day off and Serve The Unfortunate.

But what actually happens is I get a harassing email from my boss, my kids have the stomach flu so I’m cleaning up unmentionable bodily fluids all day and my spouse pushes all my buttons and my neighbor didn’t wave back to me.

If I respond to all this with anger and resentment, what was the point of my good intentions—to honor God? Or to acheive a sweet Kumbaya feeling.

It pretty clear that although I’d rather be communing with my God, He wants me in the service of my immediate neighbor.

It’s a hard sacrifice, but it’s the virtue God wants to cultivate in me.

Sometimes life is a process of letting go of our expectations and wants in the service of something where we won’t even see the end result of it.
 
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Nelka said:
So in layman’s terms I should give up completely because the little I do is never enough?
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Keeping in mind that I don’t know the particulars of your situation…it may very well be that you’re wearing yourself out trying to control the uncontrollable.

(Of course, we can never give the go-ahead to commit any sin)
 
If I took a maths test every day for 17 years and kept failing it; what makes me think I will ever pass it!

Or learning to play the piano every day for 17 years and still not being able to play happy birthday on it!
 
Look, please don’t think minimizing your pain 🙂 Obviously something has/is hurting you very deeply and it doesn’t go away.

Sometimes pain doesn’t “go away”.

Also, I don’t have a fairy tale life either. Sometimes life makes you scream in anguish. But you have to decide how you’re going to cope.
Either with complete surrender to God without a secret agenda, or to keep banging yourself against a wall trying to get a certain outcome you have in your head
 
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