December 21, 2018
Christmas Novena Day 7
Dear Family of Mary!
Today we ask for the grace to yearn for peace and to seek it! Our Lady tells us that we must pray, pray, pray if we want our yearning to be fulfilled.
December 25, 1998 “Dear children! In this Christmas joy I desire to bless you with my blessing. In a special way, little children, I give you the blessing of little Jesus. May He fill you with His peace. Today, little children, you do not have peace and yet you yearn for it. That is why, with my Son Jesus, on this day I call you to pray, pray, pray, because without prayer you do not have joy or peace or a future. Yearn for peace and seek it, for God is true peace. Thank you for having responded to my call.”
Our Lady tells us it is good to yearn. It is important to seek. We must desire what is most important and in our hearts hold vigil for it. Seeking is a function of hope. We receive hope from the Lord, the true hope which is based on our true destiny of life with God for eternity. Hope is hope when it is hope for God. It is the same with yearning and seeking. We yearn for Jesus; we pine for Him. We need Him more than life itself. This is proper yearning.
It is interesting that Our Lady brings Baby Jesus with her on Christmas Day. She brings the source of all our hope, the object of all our yearning and the one we seek. She brings Him to bless us and to give us His peace. Everything is there for us on that day!
But we know that we cannot rest on the grace of one day. We must live our lives. And in doing so, it is through prayer that we will find what our hearts desire. We will find union with Jesus, and true peace. Our Lady says, “That is why, with my Son Jesus, on this day I call you to pray, pray, pray, because without prayer you do not have joy or peace or a future.” Prayer helps us to express our yearning and our seeking.
Prayer helps us connect with the Lord, who is the answer to all our yearning and seeking. And prayer opens our hearts to the graces the Lord wants to give us so that we can travel through this world of time and space, and finally enter the eternal Kingdom of Heaven for which we yearn.
Yearning and seeking is indeed what fills much of the Old Testament. Our older brothers, the Hebrew people, yearned for God and sought Him as best they could. We can pray as they did. They show us how to express the depths of our hearts to God. Jesus will always answer such prayer.
My soul yearns for thee in the night,
my spirit within me earnestly seeks thee.
For when thy judgments are in the earth,
the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. (Isa 63:9)
It is good to seek the Lord, to yearn for Him. It is this kind of prayer that will keep us moving in the right direction!!
Let us pray:
May the Virgin Mary help us to open the doors of our hearts to Christ, Redeemer of man and of history; may she teach us to be humble, because God looks upon the lowly; may she enable us to grow in understanding the value of prayer, of inner silence, of listening to God’s Word; may she spur us to seek God’s will deeply and sincerely, even when this upsets our plans; may she encourage us while we wait for the Lord, sharing our time and energies with those in need.
Mother of God, Virgin of expectation, grant that the God-who-comes will find us ready to receive the abundance of his mercy.
May Mary Most Holy, “Woman of the Eucharist” and Virgin of Advent, prepare us all to joyfully welcome Christ’s coming and to celebrate worthily his sacramental presence in the mystery of the Eucharist. -St. John Paul II
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
©Mary TV 2018
