do I believe in the power of prayer?

I watched this short video clip last night. I was struck by this particular response to a prayer request: "We got an expected blessing from unexpected people."

It was an interesting juxtaposition to a conversation I had earlier yesterday afternoon with a friend about prayer requests. She doesn't believe that middle-class material dreams can be attributed to God's favor: nice houses, good jobs, good health, pregnancies, etc. Her point being that it assumes that those who have these privileges are blessed by God, while the majority of the world is not.

And this has got me wondering what I believe about prayer? Does God answer prayer requests? What does God care about? There are a handful of unanswered prayer requests I've had over the years. I go through periods when I question God and his attention; I go through periods when I don't.

I suppose this is a period when I lean towards the belief that God answers prayers for his Kingdom's glory, and that alone. I can pray for certain things, and God could answer my prayers in a snap of a celestial finger. But to what end? And to whose glory? Sometimes we are not ready to have our prayers answered because we will manipulate them for our sake and benefit, not God's. Sometimes we can have our material dreams come true, and they are not from God. Sometimes things that cause pain are from God, if they are for God's glory. Pain is not evil, though our responses to pain can be.

As Pastor Bill preached in yesterday's sermon: this is the distinction between ancients and moderns. Ancients believed in a God-centric reality; moderns believe in a self-centric reality. What does it take for us to remove ourselves from the center of God's story? What does it take to acknowledge that our comforts are not part of the Kingdom plan; and as long as they remain so, the sources of our happiness will always be temporal?