“Lord, help me." This is the prayer of the foreigner woman, the Canaanite, the one whose only claim on Jesus is her love for her daughter and her need.

Pray this prayer this week, as many times a day as you can remember to do it. Pray it about the big things in your life, and pray it about the little, trivial, everyday stuff too. Try to pray it about something it never before occurred to you to ask God’s help for.

Pray it for yourself, but try also to pray it on behalf of anybody you become aware of who has any sort of need—family, friends, people at work, people on the street, people in the news—anybody. Lord, help me—help him, help her, help them—help us.

Try to pray it with the simplicity and directness of the Canaanite woman in the Gospel story.