The Prayer Exchange?

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about prayer, partly because I'm doing a series at my church on it, and partly because I've been struggling with prayer.

The struggle I have often with prayer is simply, what does it do?  I know that it is a way to connect and build a relationship with God.  That seems to work in a contemplative style of prayer, which I love.  But what about those prayers of petition.  You know the prayers asking God for things.  Besides the feeling that God should be a cosmic vending machine giving us what we ask for if we can only put the combination of change together and hit the right button (part of the message for tomorrow), I just wonder what the point is if God is really going to do whatever God feels is best at the time.  And looking around the world, it can be pretty hard to see what God is doing.

So I can pray for whatever I want and God will answer however God wants, then what's the point?  Should we do these kind of prayers at all?  Even prayer request time can quickly turn into gossip time.  Someone will lift up a prayer and then we ask all kinds of questions to get more detail as if the more details we give God the better the chance of God granting that wish (Is God a Genie?).  Which seems to be a perversion of the spirit of prayer requests. 


In exchange for talking to God, God will grant us three wishes, I mean prayer requests.  Then all will be well.  Except it doesn't seem to work that way at all.  It seems like God works in this world differently than how we expect.  Sometimes it can feel like God doesn't work at all, or is that just because God refuses to encroach on our free will.  Then what do prayers of petitions do other than voice our deepest desire to the creator of the universe?  Maybe that's all it is...