Dear God, Please help me, because I'm a clueless stupid sinner. After 20 years of the same prayer, I get no answer. What say you?
Perhaps God has answered and you just did not recognize his answer.
Did it come through circumstances in your life?
Other people?
Was a door opened for you and you didn’t walk through it?
Were you asked to do something and didn’t follow through on the request?
God answers our prayers constantly. Our job is to listen ALL the time.
My wife came up with this prayer, which I think is brilliant in its Augustinian simplicity: "Lord, give me/us what I/we need to do your will."
But prayer, despite the root meaning of the word, is more than petition. Maybe, just maybe (I would not consider me any kind of expert in these things) it would be good to thank God for what He has already given you. You have a mind, a computer, the ability to reason, more or less, a desire to turn to God, ACCESS to God (we often seem to neglect the wonder of God's willingness to pay any attention at all to our blather), friends and acquaintances to whom you can turn for conversation about prayer and other things. You have remarkable and commendable persistence and patience in besieging God so long and so simply.
There is one place, for you, where you can meet God: in His "here". And His "here" includes your "here", as His "now" includes your "now". So here and now is where God is.
We have two problems. The first is that of course we don't really believe that. And the second is that we are rarely content to be here and now. Sometimes it seems that all I have to do is open my breviary and my mind goes rushing off to the demands of the coming day.
Me to God: Your call is very important to me. Unfortunately all my faculties are busy with nonsense. Your call will NOT be answered in the order in which it was received, because if any other nonsense interposes itself, your foolish servant will go a-haring off after that. Only you can deliver me from this. Still, I will try to be here and now, and try to believe and behave as though I believed that even when I am not here, you are.