Seven Petitions: Thy Will Be Done
We pray the Our Father often, maybe so often that we forget what we are praying for particularly. Seven petitions make up this prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ taught His disciples, seven petitions that we pray to this day. All of them ask God the Father to do something for us, naturally. Many of them require our active participation, some more expressly so than others. And the one petition that sums up this latter part, our part beautifully is: “Thy will be done.”
Seven Petitions
The seven petitions are:
Hallowed be Thy Name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven:
Give us this day our daily [epiousion] bread;
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
All of these, one can argue, are solely gifts from God. All of these, one can also argue, require a degree of choice on our part. The very fact that we are asking these particular things simply because Our Lord taught us to ask for them, is already a choice. On the other hand, some of these seem quite out of our control, like deliverance from evil, bringing about the kingdom of God, or being given our ‘daily’ bread. Our main responsibility here is to prepare our heart for these, so it seems.
The Hardest Thing
But the hardest thing among the seven, and the one on which the other six hinge, is the third:
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Why is this so hard? It is so hard because in order for God’s will to be done on earth, we have to do what God wants. Not what we want, but what God wants. Therein lies the difficulty, and surely because it is so difficult, this is the one petition that we find reconfirmed by Our Lord during the Agony in the Garden, when he saw all that was going to happen to him in agonizing detail and prayed for the cup to pass Him by. “Thy will be done”, was the end of this petition, however. “Thy will be done, not mine.”
Jesus Gives the Example
So let us draw comfort from the example of Our Lord. “Thy will be done”, even if I am scared, and do not understand why. My understanding is not required. All I need to do is to ask for God’s will to be done, here on earth as well as in heaven, and let things happen the way God wants them to be, rather than be in the way with my own ideas and interpretations. No matter what happens: God knows why.
How do I start aligning my will with God’s? How do I return to a life in accordance with God’s will? Contrition is the first step, and contemplative prayer might be a way past your own understanding and into a closer connection with the divine Will. Start today.
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