In the Gospels, there are instances where people approach Jesus and ask him for something in this world. There are also instances where people approach Jesus and, showing faith, speak of the next world and his spiritual kingdom. And there are other instances that are mixtures of the two.

Many times, when Jesus was asked to decide about this world, he simply said that was not his mission. And that was that! The conversation stopped.

I think, in some sense, it is like this in prayer, too. When we pray for someone else, or for ourselves, we can only “pray continually” – that is, in the summit of our soul, as contemplation and a beggar for God’s gift of contemplation – if our eyes are on the things of heaven, the things of grace, the things of charity in themselves, begging, begging, begging, that God – as we know he too wants – will not stop knocking on the doors of our hearts.

But when we pray for someone’s health, or a miracle regarding their situation, or when we vaguely pray for them without any consciousness of whether we are asking for something temporal or something eternal, the prayer, too, is temporal. It must start and stop. It cannot be continuous. It cannot be continually united to Jesus, because, as soon as the slightest flicker of doubt crosses our minds, we must say, “But not what I want, what you want, Lord.”

It isn’t so when we pray, beg, beg without ceasing for God’s will to be done and for God to rain down grace on the just and the unjust. In that case, we never stop to say, “But not what I want, what you want, Lord,” because we know it is his will. We are uniting our will to his. We are loving him continually.

These are just reflections. Of course, we’re living a life where we pray both ways and must pray both ways.