I'm not sure that I've ever thought of prayer as an act of resignation, but this wonderful snippet in our series on prayer from Broughton Knox encourages us to do just that.

When we pray we should pray with the attitude of gladly accepting God's will in every situation, whatever that will may be. It is through perseverance in prayer that we learn what God's will is. Our resignation is not a resignation to a blind unthinking fate, to blind impersonal forces which take no interest in us or in our situation. Rather, it is the glad acceptance of the will of the heavenly Father with whom we are related. Thus Jesus, in his prayer at Gethsemane, said “Father, may this cup pass form me, yet not my will but yours be done” and when, at the end of that session of prayer, it was plain to him that the Father's will was that he should drink that cup, he said to his disciples, “Shall I not drink the cup which my Father has given me”.

Our resignation is the acceptance of the perfect will of One whom we love and trust and know. Indeed, it is the will of One whose will we know to be perfect and whose will we wish to be accomplished on earth as in heaven; because if that will is done then all things will be well. Our Lord, after he had experienced the rebuffs of the Galilean communities, rested in God's will. He said, “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes; yes, Father, for it was well pleasing in your sight”. We, too, are to have the same confident trust and acceptance of God's perfect will, even when our prayers and our hopes are not fulfilled in the way we had at first desired.

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