A Short Prayer in Urgent Needs

I have employed a short prayer formula that worked in very urgent situations. This formula is the set of one "Our Father", one "Hail Mary", and one "Glory Be". This formula is just the combination of the usual short prayers we have known and recited from grade school. I have tried it a few times and it did worked to my advantage.

The way to say it is to dedicate the prayers for a certain soul to benefit in purgatory. Alternatively, you may offer it for the sake of the sins of the world. Mentally say to God that you offer it in exchange for a very urgent petition. You don't just recite them like we used to do in grade school. You need to say them, even just mentally, but you need to mean every word that is in them. In my case, I tried to pray with them repeatedly every time I was bothered, dedicating each set to a soul in purgatory. That way, you are not only helping yourself but also making other entity benefit from your effort, in this case, the soul.

On one hand, the prayer, "Our Father" is supposed to be a very powerful prayer because it was taught to us by Jesus in the Bible. On the other hand, the "Hail Mary" is a meditation of God's plan of salvation and deliverance through Mary and Jesus. The "Glory be" is the proclamation of praise and honor due God in the person of the Trinity. These prayers, however, are often taken for granted by us Christians most probably desensitized of their importance because of their prevalence in usage. We need to remember, though, that they are not ordinary prayers but ones which summarize the story our salvation.

At times, at the end of each set I would include a short prayer of offering taken from the chaplet of mercy:

"Eternal Father, I offer you the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the atonement of our sins and of the whole world. For the sake of Jesus' sorrowful passion have mercy on us and the whole world.Amen".

Bear in mind that you do not abuse the prayers to a petition that you think is against the will of God.

When One Falls

Throughout our whole life, we always have fallen in terms of our spiritual life. Even though living in the grace of light has always been a desire there never was a time that we haven't fallen in the holes of darkness. Literally, there were always times that we sinned grievously, then doubted. It usually results from our weak and selfish human nature. As a consequence, we tend to lag behind in our pursuit of the spiritual grace. In other words, we stop attending church, we cease to pray and we pretend that we are alright. However, deep in our hearts we do feel remorse yet we tend to fight back because of our pride. At times our guilt would have us say "I'm too ashamed even to talk to God!". By this, we are assuming our own fate as sinners, that we no longer deserve to have a place before Him, that we have no hope and that we will, for the rest of our life, rot in hell being sinful. However, this attitude is not going to help us in any way, and that for being steadfast in these assumptions, we surely will rot in hell! To sum up, we make our pride rule our life and this pull us backward from God's grace. For sure, none of us wants to be in the eternal fire but forget the simple truth that we can actually escape that punishment. Well, we do know how to be spared from condemnation - that we just need to get up, feel sorry, take the sacraments and try hard not to commit the same sins again. Nonetheless, we still find it hard and lose patience with the cycle that repeats itself. We lose count and think that God's "seventy times seventy times" have but all ran out. We go on living a wretched life, unable to regain the grace that's supposed to be free, abundant and impartial. We fail to get up from the fall and choose to crawl. We refuse to lift our hands to God always eagerly waiting to pick us up. We choose to do so, because we lack one basic attitude - humility, which is one thing that God wants from us.