Thursday January 13th: Thy will be done

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees,“If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

Mark 1 40-45

This man in St Mark’s Gospel is so humble. We are told it moved Jesus to pity and he replied ‘I will; be clean’. The story teaches us the way we must pray, with humility.
So often we pray as though giving instructions to God and when our prayers are not answered, we are annoyed that God did not follow our directives.
We fail to grasp the majesty of God and our own insignificance in comparison. We must go to God on bended knee and humble supplication.
The leper aware of his sinfulness, foreshadows Jesus’ cry in the Garden of Gethsemane ‘not my will but yours be done’.
Like the leper we pray to God in petition but recognizing that God’s will for our life is paramount and our desires are subject to his plan for our lives.
When St Paul prayed asking for a thorn in his side to be removed, he accepted God’s will: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Photo by Luis Quintero from Pexels