As far as I am concerned, if God does does not answer my prayer the way I wanted, then He has not answered it. What happened to “Ask and you shall receive.”? Oh, yeah. That’s contingent upon His will also so it is basically meaningless.
Well, let me see here.
Suppose you pray, for example, for something ‘good’ to happen (good by your limited, human understanding). Suppose you pray for the drought in the Midwest to be over NOW.
But suppose that God’s plan for the whole universe involved the drought continuing for another, oh let’s say 6 months, because during that 6 months time, the situation would cause not just other areas in the U.S. but other countries to start worrying about this happening to them, and they would start making all kinds of preparations, and their scientists would go into ‘hyperdrive’ to develop all kinds of new technologies to help crops in this kind of situation. Those technologies would then in the coming decades be used to bring all kinds of desert areas into productive crop land.
And as for those suffering ‘now’; well, God doesn’t forget them either. During this 6 months there is time for others to reach out and help these people --and you know, we’ve seen in the US at least that there is much help that goes out to victims in disasters. God works through us as we help others.
But if the drought ended when you arbitrarily said "Now’, as so often happens, the situation just would not have been ‘enough’ to bring it into prominence. Therefore, the scientists don’t go on to develop those technologies, or don’t do it as quickly, and hundreds of thousands go hungry or even die, who would have been fed had the drought continued on "God’s time’.
We don’t see the whole picture. He does. We don’t consider that the temporary pain of one, several, or many can and does lead to healing for others. . .and thus, that the pain was not ‘in vain’. I guess many have lost sight of the idea of altruism. Oh, we bleat about ‘suffering’ and wail about hurt done to others, but we aren’t really open to doing anything about it unless it meets OUR idea of what should be done. And when things don’t happen exactly as we want, we say, “See, God doesn’t hear us”. . .but are we really PRAYING?
Aren’t we, in such cases of demanding things ‘our way’ rather just TELLING GOD WHAT TO DO? Are we really asking, or are we insisting? Are we listening to Him and perhaps getting some understanding, or we are sticking our fingers in our ears as we keep screaming, “Give it to me!”?
I believe that by demanding God give us ‘our way’ we aren’t really praying at all. Prayer is a communication between TWO beings, and adamant insistence by the ONE person to have it all his/her way and not trying to hear the other person isn’t prayer.