Thirty-eight years… this number strikes me in a new way as my thirty-eighth birthday approaches. Thirty-eight years is a long time. Who would still be hoping for a cure after thirty-eight years? My friend, isn’t it time to accept that this is just the way things are and to move on? This sort of naïve optimism is incompatible with a mature, adult life.

Yes, only a child would continue to hope for something that long experience ought to have taught him to be impossible. But in the eyes of God we are children, and to know this truth in the depths of our being is humility, the foundation of the spiritual life. To a child, there is no impossibility, for he thinks his father is omnipotent. We must outgrow this impression of our earthly father; we must grow into it with regard to our heavenly Father.

To a child, time is irrelevant. Tomorrow and 38 years from now are the same insofar as they are not now. And now is our point of contact with the Father, who dwells in the Eternal Now. Tomorrow does not exist. Yesterday is gone. All that remains is the present, in which my task is to ask and to wait for my Heavenly Father to give me the good things he has promised, even if I have already been waiting almost forty years… or sixty… or a hundred.

Saint Dominic, tireless in prayer and unwavering in faith, obtain for us the grace to wait in hope!