Today my daughter was searching our house for a recorder, an instrument for her school music class.
Over the years we have acquired a couple of recorders, but, used by different children at various times for school, their whereabouts are not always known. (Yes, unfortunately things do get lost in our house sometimes.)
“Should we write a note to the teacher, saying we have a recorder, but we just don’t know where it is?” my daughter asked.
“No, we’ll find it,” I said, pulling open and peering into desk drawers in our home office. “Go look in your brother’s cubby.”
“I did. It’s not there,” she said. Then, a millisecond later: “Where’s his cubby?”
We laughed as she realized that she’d answered too quickly, even before she fully comprehended my direction.
Then my husband walked in. “I checked the cubby,” he said, handing my daughter the elusive recorder. “Here you go.”
Are you sure?
Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever confidently had all the answers, only to discover that you knew less than you thought?
It’s a very humbling experience, which is a good way to tame our intrinsically prideful human nature.
So many times in my own life, I’ve come up with my own answers too quickly, before seeking direction from God in prayer, confident that I could control outcomes by myself.
Yet, those were especially the times I should have come to Him first, prayerfully paused before acting, sought His will before jumping to my own quickest and easiest solutions.
“Never be men or women generous in action and sparing in prayer,” said St. Josemaria Escriva in The Way (#937). “What a pity if in the end you had carried out your apostolate and not his apostolate!” (#967).
He also said: “Action is worthless without prayer; prayer is worth more with sacrifice” (#81). “First, prayer; then, atonement; in the third place — very much ‘in the third place’ — action” (#82).
Seeking God’s will
St. Teresa of Calcutta said, “Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.”
During this season of Advent, this time of fully emptying our hearts in preparation for the birth of Our Savior, I am going to strive daily to put prayer before action and to purposefully set time aside each week for Adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament so that I can prayerfully discern His will — not my own — in the various circumstances that arise in my everyday life.
And I am planning to bring my children with me, to teach them to do the same, and to ask them to hold me accountable.
It’s one way we can help each other depend on God — instead of ourselves — to find the right answers in our lives.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four young children, is a member of St. John the Baptist Parish, Waunakee.