Cultivation.

Taking care of a plant is a huge process. It doesn't require simply placing a seed into the ground and expecting things to grow from it. One has to nurture it, watch it carefully, water it, make sure it's in a place where it would get plenty of sun, fertilize it, protect it from bugs or small animals, prune it...the list goes on and on. But when you do all of these things, the plant eventually grows strong, beautiful, fruitful...and due to the way nature beautifully works out, it in turn can affect the area around it due to pollination. When you put hard work into a seed, it can create such a huge impact.

This can be akin to prayer. When you work at prayer and your faith life, it can completely transform your life for the better, along with the people who you are involved with. I've come to know that when I pray and actively seek to improve my faith life, my own life in turn becomes more fruitful, healthy, and happy..and that my relationships with other people as well become more real and down to earth. And just like working with a seed, maintaining prayer for me is not a walk in the park. It takes a genuine effort, and the results of God's grace in my life can't be something I just "expect" to come along without me working for any of it. I've had the luck of working at Archbishop Carroll and being able to go to the Shrine every morning to pray. It was a huge blessing, but now looking back at it, I realize that maybe it was a kickstart from God to get me going in prayer. Since school has ended, my efforts to cultivate my "prayer seed" have been lackluster at best. God's grace is always something that I need in life, and I have to make sure to put in the efforts to make that happen. Whether it's maintaining daily prayer to writing in the prayer blog more often, I have to maintain and constantly work at being closer to Christ. 

Sometimes, one of the things that occur is that I get so behind in where I want to be with prayer and my faith, that I start feeling sorry for myself and ashamed that I haven't been "good enough" for God. That feeling can permeate and just make it harder to get back into the right swing of things. But I heard something about Judas (I believe it was on the radio...but to be honest, I'm not completely sure) that really has hit me lately. We all know Judas as the man who betrayed Jesus and then hung himself due to his shame. The tragedy of Judas doesn't lie in the betrayal, which is what everyone focuses on. It truly lies in his inability to seek forgiveness and to return to God. We are like Judas in the sense that we all have times in our lives where we fail, where we fall, where we may feel that all is completely lost and that we are not worthy of forgiveness. But that is where we are completely wrong. I will always remember that there is ALWAYS time to come back to God, to make things right, to get back into prayer, to maintain my writing, to grow and cultivate His seed in my soul. It does no good to wallow in wrongdoing, but rather to learn from what has occurred, reach out to God, and grow with His grace towards a better future. Here's to a pledge of more prayer, more blog writing, more personal growth towards God...gotta get that garden growing!