Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings. It is the ability to continue even when you feel like quitting. The difference between winners and losers is their level of persistence.

As believers in Christ we need to be persistent as the Canaanite women does in Sundays Gospel lesson. Throwing in the towel at any little disappointment can make us not to be able to receive answers to our requests.

God’s time is different from our own. He does things at His own time, and He does not make mistakes, His timing is always right and accurate. His words tells us in Isaiah 55:8-9 that His ways are not our ways; neither is His thoughts our thoughts….

The 1970 Broadway show titled The Me Nobody Knows was one of the first rock musicals ever produced. Based on an anthology of writings by urban young people, it included this song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPJ0b6sNOMk titled “The Tree:”

This man I know
Has an apple tree he’s hoping will grow
day after day he waits
and what does he see?
Not one apple on the tree…..

In these dog days of summer, you might want to try a new spiritual practice ─ napping! To be sure, this is not what we typically think of when we imagine prayer practices. Our ideas may tend more toward kneeling or sitting quietly, reciting memorized or improvised prayers, praying one of the daily offices in our prayer book, or perhaps meditating to clear our minds. Maybe we enjoy a walking meditation, or saying a rosary, or reading scripture, or gazing at an icon. And these are all wonderful practices (though maybe not the kneeling if you have bad knees!). But napping?! Seriously?….

Throughout our lives there are times, we may feel discouraged and down, but always remember that God is by our side and watches over us through it all.

The sparrow is one of the smallest birds in the world and may be considered as of no consequence to many people. Know that God cares and notices when one of them falls to the ground.

Part of this coming Sunday’s Gospel, Matthew 10:29-31, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. Even the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”…

Every week or two, Assisting Bishop Mary Glasspool writes a letter to clergy. There’s a theme to each letter, and she wrote recently about prayer (specifically corporate prayer; prayer within worshipping communities). She included this quotation from a book written in 1990 by Garrison Keillor, which mentions Holy Apostles:

…Episcopalian was the church in wingtips, the Church of the Scotch and soda. So when I moved to New York and walked into Holy Apostles, I was surprised to see no suits. Nobody was well dressed. A congregation of a hundred souls on lower Ninth Avenue, a church with no parking lot, which was in need of paint and the sanctuary ceiling showed water damage, but which managed (I learned the next week) to support and operate a soup kitchen that fed a thousand New Yorkers every day, more than a million to date. Black faces in the sanctuary, old people, exiles from the Midwest, the lame and the halt, divorced ladies, gay couples: the real good anthology of the faith. I felt glad to be there. When we stood for prayers, bringing slowly to mind the goodness and the poverty of our lives, the lives of others, the life to come, it brought tears to your eyes, the simple way Episcopalians pray….