Share this with someone you know who may need it:
Dear Saint Joseph, you were yourself once faced with the responsibility of providing the necessities of life for Jesus and Mary. Look down with fatherly compassion upon me in my anxiety with my present inability to support my family. Please help me find gainful employment very soon, so that this great burden of concern will be lifted from my heart and that I am soon able to provide for those whom God has entrusted to my care. Help me guard against discouragement, so that I may emerge from this trial spiritually enriched and with even greater blessings from God. Amen.
Some background:
St. Joseph is known as the Patron Saint of numerous people and professions, including unborn children, fathers, immigrants, workers, carpenters, and civil engineers, to name just a few. He is also the patron saint against doubt and hesitation, and of a happy death. In the 19th century Blessed Pope Pius IX proclaimed St. Joseph Patron and Protector of the Universal Church.
The 12th Century saint Saint Bernard once said of St. Joseph’s great power as an intercessor that he “has been granted the power to help us in every kind of need, and to defend all who have recourse to him with pious dispositions.”
As St. Teresa of Avila wrote in her Autobiography “Those who practice prayer should have a special affection for him always. I do not know how anyone can think of the Queen of the Angels, during the time that she suffered so much with the Child Jesus, without giving thanks to Saint Joseph for the way he helped them. If anyone cannot find a master to teach him how to pray, let him take this glorious saint as his master and he will not go astray.”
St. Joseph, and his beloved spouse our Blessed Mother Mary indeed went through more than their share of poverty and hardships, as well as great joys, in raising Jesus. (Think in this regard of their arduous journey to Bethlehem for our Savior’s birth in a cave and of the necessity of their exile for a time in Egypt to keep Him out of harm’s way, for examples.)
Source: Our Catholic Prayers
St. Joseph, pray for us!
