When we pray, we should avoid being bashful. Instead, we should be bold. We should shoot for the moon with our requests. After all, God made it.
I often subconsciously subscribe to the erroneous idea that I should not ask too much of God. My prayers should be few and focused if I want them to be answered. I feel an obligation to make my petitions manageable and reasonable – not too many and not asking too much. I have become conscious of this strain on my prayer life – especially in this month of November as we remember and pray for the dead, in addition to many other prayer requests in a busy time. Faced with a long list of people for whom to pray, I also face the unfounded uncertainty that I can effectively pray for all of them, as if God will forget a name or reach a threshold where he gets annoyed with my long list and decides not to respond at all. But that’s not who God is. I know those perceptions of prayer are skewed and need rehabilitation.
A religious sister once told me that more prayer intentions simply multiply the graces God gives. Her statement baffled me because of my admittedly silly operating worldview of God’s limited generosity, but I am finally coming to terms with the truth which she revealed to me. It helps me to think of St. Teresa of Avila’s encouragement to ask great things of our King because by doing so, we pay him a compliment. She even said that it would be an insult to ignore the great King who resides in our hearts.
St. Teresa wrote, “Avoid being bashful with God, as some people are, in the belief that they are being humble. It would not be humility on your part if the King were to do you a favor and you refused to accept it…. A fine humility it would be if I had the Emperor of Heaven and earth in my house, coming to it to do me a favor and to delight in my company, and I were so humble that I would not answer his questions, nor remain with him, nor accept what he gave me, but left him alone. Or if he were to speak to me and beg me to ask for what I wanted, and I were so humble that I preferred to remain poor and even let him go away, so that he would see I had not sufficient resolution.”
Intellectually, I am aghast at such a terse attitude toward God! And yet I know that this is the default disposition of my heart – hesitant in a false humility. I keep my list of intentions short as if it would increase the Lord’s favor, when what he really desires is for me to run to his fatherly arms with the abandon of a daughter who is not afraid to ask for the moon.
By automatically excluding God’s cares from the little details of our lives, we are not being reverent, as we might suppose; instead, we make God petty and selective. I am skeptical of God’s power and love because I make the mistake of thinking about him in too-human terms. If God is really omnipotent, our number or degree of petitions do not diminish the efficacy of our prayers. God is the perfect, patient, powerful listener. He is far beyond our human estimations – not by being above and aloof, but by being intimately involved and caring.