In honor of tomorrow’s feast of guardian angels, today I’m going to give you another one of my “this was an angel…maybe” stories.
A month ago, I started thinking about how one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is “hunger for prayer.” I didn’t know that six or seven years ago when one day I just suddenly felt hungry for prayer. It sounds odd, but that was the only way I could describe it then, in the moment. I actually used those words, that I felt hungry for prayer. Specifically, I felt hungry for the rosary, so I did pray one later that day, and my intention for that rosary was to pray it again the next day. And I’ve been doing it ever since.
I found this list with “hunger for prayer” as something the Holy Spirit gives you, and I began to wonder about way-back-then, and finally I said to my guardian angel, “You mean you could just pray for something like that for me, and God might have given it to you?”
Because it just seemed so odd to me, and yet it makes sense that our desire to reach out to God is itself a gift from God.
I didn’t really think about it again after saying that. It’s not as if I know how God thinks, after all.
A week later, I was praying for a woman whose baby has the same condition Emily had. Kiddo#2 sat beside me and saw something I’d posted online to her, and she asked why the **hugs**. I explained about this woman’s baby being sick, and Kiddo#2 was sad for her as well.
Later that night, I had just started praying when she came into the room, and of course all the cats were around me. (We’ve covered that before.) She said, “You’re like the cat woman,” and I said, “If you get out your rosary, they’ll come to you too.” So she did, and they didn’t come. I said, “Well, stay and pray with me,” and…she did.
Odd.
The next day, she asked if she could pray the rosary with me again for that woman’s baby, and Kiddo#3 said, “Can I pray it too?”
And Kiddo#4 (he’s four years old) asked if he could join us as well.
This was…odd.
The next day was Sunday, and Kiddo#4 decided for some reason that after Mass, we were going to buy him a rosary. Fortunately I’d been at a local collectible crap store recently and found they were selling “rosary necklaces,” so I rescued one and now Kiddo#4 has his own multicolored rosary.
Like I said, odd. And they keep wanting to pray it with me. Today the four year old asked me if he could pray the rosary with me, cuddled up in the living room.
So what’s going on? Did my guardian angel take my question as a challenge and ask for hunger for prayer as a gift for my children?
