It is all about our will

“I am ready to be offered” (2 Timothy 4:6, King James Version). It is a transaction of will, not of sentiment. Tell God you are ready to be offered; then let the consequences be what they may, there is no strand of complaint now, no matter what God chooses. God puts you through the crisis in private, no one person can help another. Externally the life may be the same; the difference is in will. Go through the crisis in will, then when it comes externally there will be no thought of the cost. If you do not transact in will with God along this line, you will end in awakening sympathy for yourself. – Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest. 2/5

Don't pray alone

Some form of spiritual community is the testing ground, showing whether we are actually growing in love, service, and faithfulness. We must not withdraw to a private, isolated spirituality in which we do our contemplative sit each day and ignore the school of relationship. Private or individualistic prayer is no prayer at all, in fact it is not possible, because prayer is precisely plugging into a shared field of knowing, feeling, and loving. St. John Cassian called any attempt at “private prayer” pax perniciosa, dangerous peace, because it keeps us feeling separate and superior instead of connected and compassionate. - Richard Rohr

O what great grace is offered to us

"Man threw away everything he had—his right  to speak freely, his communion with God, his  time in Paradise, his unclouded life—and went  out naked, like a survivor from a shipwreck.  But God received him and immediately clothed  him, and taking him by the hand gradually led  him to heaven. And yet the shipwreck was  quite unforgivable. For this tempest was entirely  due, not to the force of the winds, but to the  carelessness of the sailor. Yet God did not look  at this, but had compassion for such a great  disaster. … Why? Because, when no sadness   or care or labor or toil or countless waves of  desire assaulted our nature, it was overturned  and fell. And just as criminals who sail the sea  often drill through the ship with a small iron tool,  and let the whole sea into the ship from below,  so when the devil saw the ship of Adam (by  which I mean his soul) filled with many good  things, he came and drilled through it with his   voice alone, as if it were an iron tool, and stole  all his wealth and sank the ship itself. But God  made the gain greater than the loss, and brought  our nature to the royal throne." — St. John Chrysostom, A Year with the Church Fathers, p. 19

Ask....

"In the spiritual life there are two great principles which should never be forgotten: Without grace we can do nothing; with it we can do all things. Sometimes it anticipates our desires; ordinarily, God waits till we ask for it. This is a general law thus expressed by Our Lord: 'Ask, and it shall be given to you.' Prayer is, therefore, not only a precept, it is a necessity. God places the treasure of His graces at our disposal, and its key is prayer. You desire more faith, more hope, more love; 'ask, and it shall be given to you.' Your good resolutions remain sterile, resulting always in the same failures: 'ask, and it shall be given to you'. Precepts are numerous, virtue painful, temptation seductive, the enemy ruthless, the will weak: 'ask, and it shall be given to you.'"

— Rev. Dom Vitalis Lehodey The Ways of Mental Prayer  p. xv