Our second purpose in praying is that we may be fitted by God to carry out his will effectively.  And that is a process which may take time.  We see that very clearly from Our Lord’s teaching of his Apostles.  It took him two years to transform them into the sort of men whom he could effectively use; and it was only then that he dispatched them on that worldwide mission for which he had chosen them, and for which he needed them.

And at a lesser level exactly the same is true of his relationship with us.  So we must not be in the least surprised if we have to wait some time before we see an answer to our prayers.  An apt illustration of this is provided by the case of Hannah in the Old Testament.

For years Hannah had longed for a child, until at last that longing drove her to pray as she had never prayed before.  She and her husband were making their annual pilgrimage to the Shrine of God at Shiloh and, as we read in the First Book of Samuel, “she was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly.  And she vowed a vow and said, ‘O Lord, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thy maidservant, and remember me, and not forget thy maidservant, but will give to thy maidservant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life’ “ (1:11).

And in due time her prayer was answered and she called the child Samuel, which means, ‘Asked of God’.  And as soon as he was old enough she took him, as she had vowed, to God’s Shrine at Shiloh, and there he was brought up by the old priest who ministered at the shrine.  In that way he was trained and fitted for his vocation as the first of a long line of prophets and as the religious leader of the people in the critical years that lay immediately ahead.

But if Samuel had been given to Hannah without her having to wait so long and pray so desperately for him, then he would have been brought up at home in the ordinary way like the other children she had after him, and so he would never have been trained for the part which God had designed for him to play in the nation’s history.