Someone is gonna say or think it, “there is no ‘I’ in prayer.” And, you are right, ‘I’ should never be in prayer. But, so often, we (I know I do) insert ‘I’ into prayer.
The tendency to set acceptable conditions upon God, to seek unconsciously to make his will for us coincide with our desires, is a very human trait. And the more important the situation is, the more totally we are committed to it, or the more completely our future depends upon it, then the easier it becomes for us to blind ourselves into thinking that what we want is surely what God must also want. We can see but one solution only, and naturally we assume that God will help us reach it. In any case, I am sure that this tendency was strong in me.
I know so many times my prayer of ‘trust’ was one of command. I knew what the best outcome was and of course, God saw this as well and would agree with me.
It is an awful thing, this dross of self that spoils even the best things we do out of the supposedly highest motives. “Like gold in the furnace He tried them,” says the Book of Wisdom about the souls of the just. Somehow, by the trials and tribulations of this life, our souls must be purified of this dross of self if we are to become ultimately acceptable to God.
For each of us, the trials will come in different ways and at different times—for some, self may be easier to overcome than for others—but we were created to do God’s will and not our own, to make our own wills conform to his and not vice versa. We can daily pray for the grace to do this, without always meaning it; we can promise quite easily in prayer that we will do it. What we fail to see is how much of self still resides in that promise, how much we are trusting in our own powers when we say that we will do it.
In large tests or small, therefore, God must sometimes allow us to act on our own so we can learn humility, so we can learn the truth of our total dependence on him, so we can learn that all our actions are sustained by his grace and that without him we can do nothing—not even make our own mistakes.
Learning the full truth of our dependence upon God and our relation to his will is what the virtue of humility is all about.
Often, the greatest gift God can give a soul is to let it struggle and fight through a challenge it can’t win. That in those losses, the soul finds its true dependence upon God.
For in the foundry of humility the soul is purified and finally learn to trust in God not in self.