Perseverance in Prayer

There is an urgency in our Lord’s sayings.  Ask, seek, knock.  These are big words as if no haphazard listlessness constituted prayer but long, long perseverance.  Nobody is going to last for more than a week in perseverance unless he recognizes the vastness of it and of the knowledge of God.  We shall really, seriously recognize that, if we are to grow, it is not by a slow meandering along pleasant paths, but by stern climbing, ready for all the adventures of the way, all the different climates through which we must pass.  God tempers our souls to be strong, supple, serviceable, pliant weapons in his hands.  Prayer is just clinging to God with one hand when the other has failed; if both have failed then, somehow, clinging on by the eyelids; like a cat which clings on to you and if you detach one claw there is always another claw and then another.

– from Growing by Stern Climbing by Edward Keble Talbot (1877–1949)