Any help is good help

Powering through the last of the First Year Teacher archives, I came across a post that dealt with encounters with well-meaning people of other religions, which brought to mind a recent event that had totally slipped my mind. R and I were out to dinner with his parents, and his mom was telling me about this ritual card that one of her sisters had sent her. The ritual is called a novena, which involves praying to some saint once a week for nine weeks (I know Wikipedia says nine days, I'm just repeating what I was told), and at the end of the ordeal your prayers will come true. She then asked me if there was anything I would like her to pray for. Now, being brought up in the Protestant tradition with a mother who is somewhat militant about her faith (i.e. everyone else is wrong), a few of her ideas have managed to rub off on me. Saints are a concept that doesn't quite jive with me. If God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient, why do you need someone else to put in a good word for you? In any case, I decided that the right course of action was to ask for her to pray that I will have good students next year. It really couldn't hurt.