The persevering prayer of the just is of great value6. And it has so much power because we ask in the name of Jesus. He heads our petition and acts as Mediator before God the Father. The Holy Spirit stirs up supplication in our soul, when we do not even know what we should ask for. The one who is to grant asks with us that it be granted to us, what more certainty can we desire? Only our inability to receive limits the gifts of God. As when one goes to a fountain with a small or leaky vessel.
The Lord is compassionate and merciful with our deficiencies and with our evils. Sacred Scripture frequently presents the Lord as a God of mercy, using touching expressions: he has bowels of mercy, he loves with tender love, like mothers.... St. Thomas, who frequently insists that divine omnipotence shines forth in a special way in mercy, teaches how in God it is abundant and infinite: "To say of someone that he is merciful," teaches the Saint, "is like saying that he has a heart full of miseries, that is, that before the misery of another he experiences the same sense of sadness that he would experience if it were his own; whence it comes that he strives to remedy another's sadness as if it were his own, and this is the effect of mercy. Well then, it is not God's business to be saddened by the misery of another; but to remedy miseries, understanding by misery any defect whatsoever, is what is most incumbent upon God".
In Christ, Pope John Paul II teaches, God's mercy is made particularly visible. "He himself embodies and personifies it. He himself is, in a certain sense, mercy". He knows us well and has compassion for our sickness, for the bad economic situation we are perhaps going through..., for the sorrows that life sometimes brings with it. "We - each one of us - are always very interested; but God Our Lord does not mind that, at Holy Mass, we place before Him all our needs. Who does not have things to ask for? Lord, this sickness... Lord, this sadness... Lord, that humiliation that I do not know how to bear for the sake of your love? We want good, happiness and joy for the people of our house; our hearts are oppressed by the fate of those who hunger and thirst for bread and justice; of those who experience the bitterness of loneliness; of those who, at the end of their days, do not receive a look of affection or a gesture of help.
"But the great misery that makes us suffer, the great need that we want to remedy is sin, the estrangement from God, the risk that souls will be lost for all eternity ". The state of the souls of those we deal with most frequently must be our first request, the most urgent petition that we raise each day to the Lord.