Seeking Help with Humility and Confidence

Often at the Mount our call to prayer at vespers is “O God, come to my assistance; O God, make haste to help me.” This acknowledgment that we need God is key to developing humility, which, as Sr. Jeanne Weber says, “…is nothing other than knowing the truth about who I am.” The truth is, we need help from God and others from the moment of our birth until our death. When we have the hubris to believe that we can go it alone outside the body of Christ, we live out of falsehood and create problems for ourselves and others.

Another aspect of the truth about who we are is that, because we are children of God, we have the right to ask God for help. Scripture provides many examples of this privilege: “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3); “Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; You will cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am’” (Isaiah 58:9); “I have called upon You, for You will answer me, O God” (Ps 17:6).

In the book Consolations, David Whyte notes, “To ask for help and…to feel that we deserve it may be the engine of transformation itself.” When we have both the humility to ask for help and, paradoxically, the confidence that God will respond out of love, then our lives will be transformed because we will be living the truth of who we are: persons with limitations who need help and can trust our loving God to listen and answer.