“Yea, I know that God will give liberally to him that asketh. Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss; therefore I will lift up my voice unto thee; yea, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold, my voice shall forever ascend up unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God. Amen.” As large language model generative AI programs have become more user-friendly and ubiquitous, they have become increasingly popular to use in a wide variety of fields and applications. Depending on the type of language used in the prompt provided by the user, these AI models can accomplish incredible things almost instantaneously. But it takes a certain amount of skill and practice to consistently get the desired results. If the prompt isn’t constructed exactly right, the AI program may yield something very different from what the user intended, or it might fail to generate a response at all. I think if we take inspiration from the sort of trial and error method of asking AI different prompts until we get the result we’re looking for and apply this to the way that we approach our prayers to our Heavenly Father, we can start to see significantly improved results from our prayers. I’m not implying that prayer is some sort of guessing game where if we can just find the exact right phrasing we can trick God into giving us anything that we want. God is far more intelligent and far wiser than any Artificial Intelligence, and He loves us so much that He will not give us answers to our prayers that will mislead or actively harm us. However, if we were to approach our prayers a little like we would approach coming up with the right prompt for an AI generator, so that when we pray and don’t get the results we prayed for, instead of giving up we re-examine the way that we asked, and the reasons behind our asking, and evaluate whether or not our request is an outgrowth of our faith and love for our Heavenly Father, or merely just a reflection of our fears and willful desires, then rather than just giving up after we got a “no” or a “not yet” or simply no answer at all, we can instead change the way we are praying. If we get an answer of no, instead of trying to wrest God’s will away from that no answer by just praying longer and louder for the same thing for which we were already told no, we rather pray for the humility to accept the answer, or we pray for understanding of why the answer must be no, or we pray for guidance for what alternative we should be seeking for instead, or we pray with gratitude that even though God didn’t answer in the way that we desired, He nevertheless answered. As we vary our approach to our prayers based on the responses that we receive, we will slowly but surely hammer and shape our will to conform more closely with our Heavenly Father. We will get better and better at developing prayers that will generate the best response - not to change or cajole or countermand God’s will but rather to accept and embrace and absorb God’s will. In this way we will get better at asking not amiss and we will always find that God giveth liberally every time we ask.
