Prayer and resistance

I was recently asked to stop teaching piano in my apartment, after having taught piano there for almost 3 years. Shortly after I received the notification, I set my mind to finding a new home.

One friend didn't like my passive response, and questioned my compliance without putting up a fight. It's true. I don't put up a lot of resistance. I heard, though, that there are tenants who fight, don't pay their rents, while the landlord can do very little about them legally.

The different types of tenant response has got me thinking: it's like praying. Sometimes a prayer is quickly answered, like facing an easy tenant, and sometimes it's not, like fighting a nasty tenant.

I used to attribute the outcome of my prayers solely to God's timing or His will. With that framework, I didn't understand the concept of "prayer and fasting" and I found v.21 in Matthew 17:14-21 (about the healing of a boy with a demon) difficult to understand.

I now see that the outcome of our prayers depends also on the difficulty/resistance of the prayed matter/person and how much we fight with prayer. No doubt about the omnipotence of God and that He can do all things. But He's teaching us, in the process, to be vigilant watchmen, to understand the difficulty of the matter, and to exercise properly our given power of prayer.