I remember reading a story about a young high school teacher named Mary. She wanted so much to succeed as a teacher. But a student named Bill was turning her into a nervous wreck and turning her class into a circus. One morning, before school began, Mary was sitting at her classroom desk writing something in shorthand. Suddenly Bill appeared at the door. “What are you writing?’’ he asked as he approached her desk. I’m writing a prayer to God,’’ she said, “Can God read shorthand?’’ he joked. “He can do anything,’’ said Mary, “even answer this prayer.’’ Then she tucked the prayer inside her Bible and turned to write on the chalkboard. As she did, Bill slipped the prayer from her Bible into his typing book. Twenty years later Bill was going through a box of his belongings that his mother had stored in her attic. He came across his old typing book. Picking it up, he began to thumb through it. Lo and behold, he found the shorthand prayer. He took the prayer and put it in his wallet. When he got to his office, he gave the prayer to his secretary to decipher.  She read it and blushed. “It’s rather personal,’’ she said. “I’ll type it out and put it on your desk when I leave tonight.’’ That night Bill read the prayer. It said: “Dear God, don’t let me fail this job. I can’t handle my class with Bill upsetting it. Touch his heart. He’s someone who can become either very good or very evil.’’ The final sentence hit Bill like a hammer. Only hours before, he was contemplating making a decision that would commit him to a life of evil. He took the note and put it back into his wallet. During the next week Bill took the prayer out several times to read it. To make a long story short, that prayer caused Bill to change his mind about doing what he was contemplating.  Weeks later Bill located his old teacher and told her how her prayer had changed his life. That story brings us to the two points about prayer that we find in today’s readings. First, prayer has enormous power. It can influence the outcome of events, and it can change the lives of people. Some time ago the successful outcome of the 33 miners in Copiapo got wide coverage. It was very interesting to see so many of them when they emerged from the capsule, they knelt to say a prayer of thanks to God. Prayer for these people played a very important role in their lives. Second, to experience the power of prayer, we must persevere in praying. For example, today’s first reading shows Moses persevering in his prayer. It is interesting to note that when he grew tired, he persevered in prayer because he got help from his friends. Where did we learn to pray? We learnt to pray from our mothers and fathers, from our grannies and granddads. Besides persevering in our daily period of prayer, as Moses did, we must also persevere from day to day and from week to week, as the widow in Jesus’ parable did. St. Patrick in his Confessions, he tells us that when he was a slave on the mountain, he learned to pray up to a hundred times a day and night. The second mountain was when he was a missionary in Ireland, St. Patrick prayed forty days on the mountain we call Croak Patrick. For example, if we want to deepen a friendship with someone, we schedule times and places to meet with that person. The same is true if we want to deepen our friendship with God. We schedule times and places to meet him in prayer This is why our mass is so important. During the pandemic we were unable to meet up with our friends and neighbours, and whatsapp groups  and zoom meetings were very common. Thankfully we are now if a better place and we are delighted that we can once again meet up with our freinds for a coffee, to go shopping or to go visiting friends and neighbours. Unfortunately a lot of people still follow the mass on our webcam and don’t come to pray and meet with our praying community at mass.Prayer does not always guarantee us a feeling of elation, but if we pray, we are putting ourselves in the line of God’s grace.