We gather in Church because we desire to do the will of God. We are people of prayer because we believe that in prayer we will discern the will of God. We pray, “Here I am.” The experience of young Samuel is one everyone prays can relate to. We place ourselves in the presence of God and wait for a word from the Lord. And we wait … and we wait. It took four times for Samuel to hear what the Lord was saying to him. For most people it can take forty or four hundred times before we understand what the Lord wants us to get. The Biblical message is that it is the very repetition in prayer that makes discerning the will of God possible. Only by fidelity to prayer are we able to sort out what comes from our own egos and what the Lord is addressing to our hearts.
