Prayer

...I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been. People who are in the habit of praying - and they include the mystics of the Christian tradition - know that when a prayer is answered, it is never in a way that you expect.
-Kathleen Norris, from Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith