There are dynamics involved with prayer.
It often takes a while to learn (practice) what those dynamics really are — especially against the backdrop that so many who have grown-up familiar with prayer often end up reporting they have to deal with.
I suspect that one of the primary crash-points has to do with the dynamic of leverage. There is a sense in which prayer has often been experienced primarily in the context of when something is needed. It also includes the dynamic of when something is wanted. And perhaps, because of that, it can end up for many being primarily about something like leverage. When this happens, it seems to become something that inevitably falls short of being self-sustaining.
Perhaps this is because it is perceived that we mostly pray when there is something that we want or need and don’t know how to make happen with just our own resources. We may pray, for example, for a health condition we or someone we love is struggling with. We really want the situation resolved, but we don't know how to make it happen — so, we pray. But, because we may be praying primarily out of self-interest, and particularly with the goal of leverage, we are also aware of something innately duplicitous about our 'prayer' efforts. We tend to pray when we need something...or just want something.
Against such a back-drop, we can find it difficult to sustain our prayers, when they feel largely ineffective.
What often challenges this dynamic is when there is pain or suffering of one kind another involved and what we want is more than just something that would make our lives easier or better. Something that relates to the quality of life we are not experiencing or that someone that we care about is dealing with. Here again we are prompted to pray when it’s more obvious that our resources cannot do much about relieving the pain or suffering involved in our situation — so we ask (even beg) for intervention or help of some kind. Even in these types of situations, we recognize that we're moderating our prayer based on the its perceived efficacy. So, if it doesn’t appear to be working or it has little perceivable effect, then we’re less inclined to pray (changing only when our sense of desperation does).
I’m not suggesting efficacy or leverage or anything related to asking for help, assistance, or flat-out intervention in the dynamics of prayer is wrong. In fact, I think to not ask for help at times like this in our lives probably reveals something else. But, I think there is something unfortunately mistaken if we persists in prayer that doesn't move the dynamic beyond the efficacy involved in prayer toward something else that is not predicated as much on resolution. Praying involves, just as much, our ability to live with our life situations in helpful ways. We pray not only for the resolution or relief for the other person, especially when we recognize something may not be able to be resolved, but also for our ability to be with someone in such situations.
We don’t have to do this very much to recognize that, even in this way, we need help and assistance and support in being able to be with a person who is suffering (in helpful ways) — that even our capacities for this are quickly depleted (and often insufficient) as we recognize that more is often needed than we can provide. This dynamic extends even further into our realization that our ability to be with someone who is suffering and to be imaginative with them in terms of thought, energy, and care. We recognize our own limitations in these situations and as this resource is both needed and explored, we discover that what we have to offer is more than just the solution that we envisioned (even prayed for) at the beginning.
Even here though we experience something in the extending of care for someone else that seems to transcend the powerlessness of the details of the situation. We recognize that not only can they not live without it, neither can we. And, so, a kind of solidarity is formed and is accessed through this dimension of the praying dynamic. One might be able to expose more of the detail involved with an understanding of what it means to care for something outside of ourselves. Caring almost innately means there is a greater kind of goodness that we desire for the realm of our existence that is bigger than just my personal experience of that existence and that caring is somehow self-perpetuating and takes on a shape that is self energizing, even when the circumstances remained largely unresolved.
If we could plot the features of this dynamic, I would be surprised to learn that one of the higher levels of the whole picture here is not love. And, I think that we know, even in its most finite of forms, that love has a kind of energy that far surpasses most other kinds of energy. Love and the energy of it enables us to generate and give of resources that we didn’t even know we had and to situations we didn’t even know how to relate to.
So, all of this to say, I think it would be fair to conclude that, among other things, prayer is an access-point to these (deeper) dynamics and that as we experience them we find that it is as much a vehicle for these energies as it is a self-contained energy in itself. This, perhaps, is when we notice that we, in the former definition or understanding, often times give up on praying, while in the latter understanding, we find that we don’t ask ourselves questions like what good is it? or what does it really accomplish? or why bother? because we know that it is giving us access to the kinds of energies that we not only wish could be extended, but that we ourselves need in order to be sustained.