When we started learning to pray, perhaps we believed that all we had to do was to ask, and that whatever we asked for, God would give us. But then we began to experience that we did not receive all that we asked for, and this was a bit confusing for us. Some people have given up praying or even their faith in God when this happened. But in one way this was like learning physics in school when we were taught that light travelled in straight lines. But later we heard that when it passed from one medium to another, light bent a little! The first lesson was a basic one, and we got to know more details as we progressed.
Look at what happened to the most famous prayer of Jesus, asking the Father to remove the cup (the cross) if possible. He prayed this three times and yet it was not granted. The great thing about Jesus is that He knew this could happen even when He prayed, and He submitted to the Father even as He asked for what He wanted (Mt.26:39).
In the case of the apostle Paul who was suffering from what he called a thorn in the flesh, he prayed three times for God to remove it. (By the way, nowadays some people don't even ask God, but simply 'declare' that it is gone!) Paul could have imagined that he was praying without ceasing, without giving up. But at the end, the thorn still did not go away. But he got an unexpected answer from the Lord that this thorn was for his good, to help him to depend on Him entirely to carry him through, even as his thorn still remained (2Co.12:9).
Doesn't this teach us that we can learn new truths from God as we pray, especially when we are waiting on Him in connection with some major issues that we are dealing with? We may be looking for our problems to go, but God has some things of greater value to give us. We may have been praying about earthly issues, but God may be offering us priceless things for eternity. We may find it somewhat strange at first to accept that the 'thorn' is still troubling us, but we can see that even so, it is still a great bargain when we see how it is going to be a blessing for eternity!
Paul was able to receive this blessing because he was mature enough to understand it. He could appreciate it that the great spiritual lesson of knowing how to be dependent entirely on the Lord was more valuable than getting the thorn removed from his earthly life (2Co.4:17).
Shall we learn to look at our prayer life like that? Are we only used to rattling off a list of prayer requests and keeping track of how many times we completed it or how long we prayed? Shall we make our prayer a dialogue with our heavenly Father? After we make our requests to Him, shall we wait to ask Him what He thinks about them? Especially when we don't get what we asked for, why don't we learn to ask God why He thought it would be better for us? We may get to hear Him teach us precious spiritual lessons that can transform our whole way of life and lead us to a closer intimacy with God.