21 April 2009

Changing the world in continued faithfulness and perseverance



Deacon Greg of Deacon's Bench blog posted an astonishingly beautiful couple of picture symbolizing the impact of one person's prayer over time. Quoting the story he read, he writes: [[According to the report: "70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day."]]



We often are tempted to think our prayers produce no fruit, no perceptible change, or that faithfulness especially to the tedium of monastic, eremitic, or lay lives is worthless. In fact we simply cannot see the effects of our faithfulness, our perseverence in all the small acts of faith and commitment to living our lives in Christ we undertake day in and day out. Remember these pictures. Beautiful as they are, they are but a shadow of the changes such faithfulness and perseverence bring in and to our world.