Thus prayer enables us to perceive God’s purpose for us so that in the end when his answer comes, however different it may be from what we once hoped or expected, we can make the best use of it for him.

For what it comes to is this: in prayer we are really asking, first that we ourselves may become the sort of people that God needs for the doing of his will; secondly, that our circumstances may be those in which we can best do it; and lastly, that we should then effectively carry it out as his agents.