"Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you" (Mt 7:7).

I don’t know about you, but this passage about the effectiveness of prayer usually leaves me uncomfortable. When I knock, the door is not always opened to me, and when I ask, I don’t always receive.

While I was preaching on this passage recently, however, a vivid image came to me: there I was knocking repeatedly on a door, but no one was answering. It turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door!

When I knock on the door of material wealth, or power, for example, expecting that behind such a door I will find ultimate satisfaction, then no wonder that the door never opens.

Then there are surely times when I seek desperately but do not find what I am looking for. But these are undoubtedly the times when I am seeking in the wrong place! It’s a tale as old as the story of Adam and Eve, and which keeps repeating itself through the ages: we race around, looking for meaning in our lives in such things as possessions, power, and prestige. But in the end, we are still left feeling incomplete, with that inner hollowness still there, unfilled.

Looking in the wrong place and knocking on the wrong door end up leaving us frustrated and disappointed in God who does not answer our prayers.

“Why doesn’t God open the door? I have been knocking on it for years!” Well, it’s always a good idea to be sure that I am knocking on the right door and not on one that leads nowhere. Once I'm sure that I've got the right door, then I'm faced with the mystery of unanswered prayer. Saint Paul writes about this problem when he reminds his readers that when our prayers are not answered, one reason may be because we do not ask properly, or do not ask for the right things.

But that's a topic for another post or two.

I have found these two images, of seeking in the wrong place and knocking on the wrong door, helpful in approaching that complex question of why God does not seem to answer our prayers.

Tree of Life and Crucifixion