“In September 1980,” said Mother Teresa of Calcutta, “I was in East Berlin, where we were going to open our first house in a country under the Communist regime. I arrived from West Berlin with a sister who was to stay there to start the work. We had applied for a visa, but since we had not yet been granted one, she was told that she could only stay in East Berlin for 24 hours; they were so strict about that…. So, we started praying the ‘Memorare’ to Our Blessed Mother, and after a while, the phone rang; there was nothing to do: the sister would have to go back to West Berlin with me…. But as we never take a ‘no’ for an answer, we kept praying and, on the eighth ‘Memorare,’ the phone rang again, I picked it up and a voice said: ‘Congratulations. You have been granted a visa. You can stay…’ She had been granted a six-month visa, the same as other sisters. The next day I returned to West Berlin, thanking Our Lady.”
This could be a story of faith or of confidence or perseverance in prayer. It could also be a story about someone who allowed God to accompany her in her life. When Jesus teaches about perseverance in prayer and tells us to pray unceasingly, among other things there is this teaching found therein: prayer is something that should always accompany us, both in good moments and situations and in bad moments and situations.
It seems that Mother Theresa was confident that God wanted the sister to receive her visa. I am pretty sure that her prayer was not a prayer to change God’s Will, but rather a prayer of someone who knows that in order to fulfill God’s Will it is necessary to be close to Him.
Although we ask God for many things through prayer, and perhaps we even keep in mind the Lord’s prayer: “thy Will be done;” many times we do not use our prayers to accompany God’s plan. Rather, our attitude is that we want Him to give us what we want and that is why we pray.
Instead of being concerned to first discover God’s Will and then to ask for what we saw to be His Will, we “make a plan” and try to “persuade” God to give us what we need according to our plan. We pray as if we need to convince God that we really want or need something particular. Our first preoccupation in prayer should be to unite our will to His, and part of His Will is to give things as an answer to prayers.
We should accompany our desire to do God’s Will with prayers rather than make God accompany our will through our prayer. If fact, sometimes people become angry with God because He does not give them what they asked for. That is a clear sign that that person was praying in order to change God, rather than to accomplish His Will.
