Reflection for Tuesday September 9 Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest: Luke 6:12-19

Gospel: Luke 6:12-19

Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. 

And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people  from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured. Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.

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Reflection:

Is prayer part of your daily life? Before making the very important decision of choosing His twelve apostles, Jesus first went to a mountain to pray. There, He spent the night in prayer to God (Luke 6:12). 

Prayer is our hotline to God; it is our means to connect with Him. Through prayer, we invite God to come into our lives. With a regular habit of prayer, the God who seems distant now becomes the God who is with us and the God who walks beside us. 

What does prayer bring us? Through prayer, we connect with God. Through prayer, He calms us, comforts us, guides us, and gives us wisdom to make the right decisions in life, to name a few. 

Who among us wouldn’t want God to be with us and to walk with us? Of course, we all long for the presence of God in our lives. This is the reason why we must always have time for Him through prayer. Our prayer life must not take a back seat to our worldly undertakings; it must always be prayer first before our many worldly activities. 

What would our worldly riches mean to us if we don’t pray? What is the use of wealth and power if God is just a superficial entity in our lives—or if we are without Him altogether? 

Someday we will die, and everything that we have accumulated in this world will no longer matter. What will matter at that time is our relationship with God, built through an active and fervent prayer life. 

Prayer is not just a duty—it is the lifeline that keeps us close to the heart of God. It transforms our weakness into strength, our confusion into clarity, and our emptiness into fullness. The more we pray, the more we experience His presence and the more we live according to His will. 

Do you make prayer the first priority of your day, or do you allow the world to drown out God’s gentle voice calling you to be with Him? – Marino J. Dasmarinas