Prayer - talking to God - is always a good way to keep him in mind and to express our gratitude. It connects us to the Lord in ways we can't achieve any other way. But sometimes I have wondered about why we pray for things. It can seem contradictory for me to believe that God is all-knowing and all-powerful and then to presume to tell him what I need (he knows better than me) or to expect that I could convince him to change his mind about what will happen. It seems that the best thing to do is simply pray, "Thy will be done" and leave it up to him to grant blessings, since surely he knows best.
A passage in the LDS Bible Dictionary (under "Prayer") addresses this, and it remains one of my favorite quotes because of its simplicity and power in explaining the true nature of prayer.
"As soon as we learn the true relationship in which we stand toward God (namely, God is our Father, and we are his children), then at once prayer becomes natural and instinctive on our part (Matt. 7:7-11). Many of the so-called difficulties about prayer arise from forgetting this relationship. Prayer is the act by which the will of the Father and the will of the child are brought into correspondence with each other. The object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but that are made conditional on our asking for them. Blessings require some work or effort on our part before we can obtain them. Prayer is a form of work, and is an appointed means for obtaining the highest of all blessings."
A couple of things strike me in this paragraph. First, prayer is not a way to change God's will, it's a way to change my will until it comes in line with God's will. If our petitions for help are accompanied with a sincere desire to understand what is best for us and what God wants of us, our prayers will help us to see the best way forward.
Just the other day, a friend of mine reminded me of the fable of the young man who by luck comes to own a horse and the villagers consider him very fortunate, but a wise man says, "Who can say what is good or bad?" The boy is thrown from the horse and breaks his leg and is made lame, and the villagers consider it a great misfortune, but the wise man says, "Who can say what is good or bad?" The army recruiters come to the village to conscript all able men to fight in the great war, but the young man is not taken because of the bad leg. While the villagers consider the young man fortunate to survive the war, the wise man again asks, "Who can say what is good or bad?"
The answer, of course, is that God knows what is good for us, but we often do not. Prayer can help us understand God's will (i.e., understand the good in even our most difficult circumstances) and find blessings in our every day.
The second thing that strikes me is the concept that prayer is a form of work. I've always believed that God operates within natural law, and that so-called miracles are simply phenomena that we don't understand, but that God certainly does. One of those natural laws is that work has to be done in order to achieve a change. Physics uses this equation: Work = Force x Displacement. The scriptures explain the same thing this way (D&C 130:20-21):
"There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated. And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated."
In a spiritual sense, a blessing is a change for our benefit, and such a change requires work. Obedience to a principle of the gospel is the work that results in blessings - temporal and spiritual growth.
Prayer is a form of work. When we can do nothing more to achieve a desired blessing, we can pray, and that will "count" as work. What a fabulous revelation! This is the very nature of God's mercy to us: When we do all that we can to follow Christ, we are blessed, but it's still not enough to overcome our imperfection. After all that we can do, we rely on the grace of Christ, which we call upon by prayer to the Father in Christ's name.
So back to the experiences of my family. Since we arrived at our new home in Dublin, Ireland, we instituted a new idea in our family prayers. Every Sunday we discuss the things for which we want to pray in the coming week and create a prayer list on a little card. Each night as we hold family prayer, the one who prays includes everything on the list. The list is revised the next Sunday.
This has worked out great, and we have seen real results. It has made our prayers more focused, concentrating our "work" on the most important things. We can feel the energy of the prayers making a change in us and in the circumstances about which we are praying. It has totally changed my outlook on prayer as I've seen the value of praying for something specific. I know that God already knows what we need, and that he knows it better than I do. But praying for things we feel we need has opened our hearts to understanding God's will and opened the window for God to grant them.
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