Does God answer specific prayers? My feeling is that this is not what God is about. He is not a benevolent fairy godfather fussing over the needs of his godchildren. God’s design for us is that we should be led to transcend this empirical existence, with all its worries, preoccupations, passions and joys, so that we may die to self and go beyond beyond, beyond the temporal and the empirical into the Void where divisions and distinctions cease to exist. This is not to say that many prayers are not perceived to be answered. Nor is it the case that healing, for example, does not occur. Many have the gift of healing. Ultimately all depends on God. Everything flows from Him and to Him but He does not manipulate the trillions of events that occur in a day of the world’s existence. Nor is it to say that the temporal and the empirical is not important. It is. It is the perceived foundation of our existence, into which we emerge and from which we progress.
It would be lovely to have a kind fairy-godfatherr type God who looked after us and answered all our wishes, but that is not the way it works. To want to have such a God is to fail to understand. It is to look at things only from the perspective of the self, to have an ego-centric viewpoint. Julian of Norwich understood.
Sin is behovely,
but all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing
shall be well.
For ‘sin’ you can also read suffering, anguish, angst, dukkha, and even death itself.