The transformation of my prayer intention

Columban Fr Seo Kyung Hi (right) with fellow missionaries during his mission journey in Taiwan. - Photo: Fr Seo Kyung Hi

Looking back, I realise that my prayer has always carried a particular intention and that intention has been quietly but steadily transformed over time.

As a child, my prayer was simple, clear and very focused. Deeply influenced by my family’s faith, I developed the habit of stopping by the church on my way to and from school. There, I would pray a novena, asking God earnestly that I might become a priest. At that stage, prayer was centred on asking - on hoping that something specific would be granted. My desire was sincere, but it was also very much about fulfilment: that my vocation would be realised according to what I believed God wanted for me.

After I joined the Columban Missionaries, however, my understanding of prayer began to shift. Through spiritual direction, I gradually came to see that prayer is not primarily about obtaining something from God, but about entering a living relationship with Him. This insight gently but profoundly changed my prayer life. My focus shifted from achieving a goal to deepening a relationship. Prayer became less about speaking and more about listening, less about striving and more about being present. I began to desire not simply to do God’s will, but to remain with Him, to grow in intimacy and trust.

A further transformation took place after my ordination, when I was assigned to serve in an indigenous parish in Taiwan. There, in the reality of pastoral ministry, I came to recognise something new. Until then, my attention had been largely on my relationship with God. But in accompanying the faithful, I began to understand that my role was not to stand at the centre, but to help others enter their own relationship with God. I was not the destination, but a bridge; not the source, but an instrument. This realisation shifted my prayer outward. I grew in appreciation for communal prayer and for the life of shared faith. Prayer was no longer only personal - it became something lived and nurtured within a community.

My missionary experiences in China and Korea, especially my time serving as a regional leader in Korea, have broadened this awareness even further. Responsibility, discernment and the challenges of leadership invited me to see God’s mission from a wider perspective. I began to understand that mission is not limited to personal calling or even to a particular community. It participates in something much larger - the ongoing work of God in the world.

Through a process of discernment that eventually led me back to Taiwan, my prayer intention underwent yet another deepening. I found myself less concerned with what I should accomplish and more attentive to who I was being called to become. My prayer gradually took shape as a desire: to be a gift to others - not in a grand way, but in the quiet, everyday encounters of mission life. I hope that my presence, my listening and my relationships may become small signs of God’s love and closeness.

Today, my prayer is simple, yet it holds within it the journey of many years: “Lord, let me become a missionary who is a gift to all whom I meet.” In this prayer, I no longer place myself at the centre. Instead, I entrust myself to God’s mission, asking only that my life may be received and given for others. And in this ongoing journey, I continue to learn what it means to pray.

Columban Fr Seo Kyung Hi lives and works in Taiwan.