There’s a wonderful line in Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’. The story is set in the hell of a Soviet prison camp, and one day Ivan is praying silently with his eyes closed, when a fellow prisoner notices him and says, ‘Prayers won’t help you get out of here any faster.’ Opening his eyes, Ivan answers, ‘I do not pray to get out of prison, I pray to do the will of God.’ That simple statement says more about the true reality of prayer than most of the sermons I’ve ever heard. It’s what Jesus was trying to teach us in the Lord’s Prayer, when he taught us to pray, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ If we get that part of the Lord’s Prayer right – that part that tells us to align our will with God’s – there’s no problem about believing that our prayers will be answered.