When children are young their bedtime prayers often sound somewhat like this, "Dear God, Please bless mommy. Please bless daddy. Please bless my brother. Please bless my friends. Please bless my grandma. Amen." As we get older our prayers often evolve into one of two things(or both), 1) a true spiritual connection with God where He does a lot of the talking even if it is through our own words or 2) "Dear God, Please bless my mom in this specific way."
As I thought about the contrast between option 1 and option 2 I decided I do both depending on how I'm emotionally feeling at the moment. When I am truly loving God and other through God, I effortlessly pray option 1. Love is such a strong emotion I have no choice but to pray with feeling. But, when I'm feeling bored, like prayer and reading the Bible is a routine or ritual necessary for me to follow, I pray option 2.
Obviously, option 1 is the way to go but my thoughts didn't stop there. I then thought about option 2 vs. the child's prayer. After a fair amount of consideration I think that the child's prayer is an example of the trust and innocence children posses. No child questions God's knowledge of how to "bless daddy." They don't consider telling Him how, which essentially is option 2.
When we pray for God to bless our grandma we trust that God will bless her in the best possible way, better than we know who. When we pray the God blesses grandma by providing the money for medicine through the wealthy friend she has so that she can go to a specific hospital and receive treatment that will heal her painlessly in one month, we are assuming that our plan is how God can best bless grandma. Unfortunately for us "option 2 prayers," this is seldom true.
God is the giver of good gifts (Matthew 7:11). If He chooses to bless someone in a way that doesn't fit our criteria, that simply means we aren't looking at the big picture. When we just ask God to bless someone or something we can rest assured in the fact that He does see the big picture and will provide the best possible, long term blessing/s.
So, as of now, my conclusion on subject is that if we are praying for others we should make our prayers as generic as possible and leave the details up to God.
p.s. My Iron Sister once wrote about Ecclesiastes commented that the author recorded "sporadic realizations." I really like that because I feel like that is how my writing my seem to the reader. Hopefully y'all like Ecclesiastes! :)
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