Larry Tippetts from his book, Receiving Personal Revelation, wrote:
How many of us have prayed fervently for something and been glad in retrospect that we did not get it? When I was growing up my family lived in nearly twenty homes in six different states. As a teenager I was a bit resentful of those moves, yet in retrospect I realized they resulted in a very close family unit; kept us active in various wards and branches; and helped me mature by learning to adjust to new circumstances, broaden my perspective, and relate to a wider range of people. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote of his decade-long incarceration in a Soviet prison system, “But so far as I myself was concerned, I once more realized the ways of the Lord are imponderable. That we ourselves never know what we want. And how many times in life I had sought what I did not need, and been despondent over failures which were successes.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2 [New York, Harper and Row, 1974], 501). When we pray, “Thy will be done,” we seek to do so without resentment but with the assurance that God really does know best.
From My Journal—Centering Prayer. . . . “As I approach the subject of prayer in my personal life or in my teaching, I always stress that the primary purpose of prayer is to get ourselves in harmony with God—to know Him—rather than to be overly concerned about what He can give us. In my study recently I came across a phrase ‘centering prayer.’ The person who coined the phrase meant for it to define the very type of prayer I am describing. The classic scriptural example is Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, ‘Not my will, but thine be done.’ Surely this is a mature form of prayer requiring a higher level of faith in God’s existence, His love and personal concern for us, and His plan for each of His children.
“This morning after showering and dressing, I knelt with the intent to simply invite my Heavenly Father and my Savior into the center of my life. It was a mental and spiritual exercise designed to alter the way I approached the new day. With Christ at the center of my being, everything I do, think, or feel passes through the reality of God and my relationship to Him. It seemed to make a very real difference in how I viewed the day before me and the circumstances of my life. My ability to make the little choices that make up a typical day was enhanced—how I prioritize and use my time, how I relate to. . .others. The adjective ‘centering’ seems to help define the essence of prayer for me. ‘Help me Father to know thy will for my life and have the strength to do my part.'” (June 3, 2007)
~Larry W. Tippetts, Receiving Personal Revelation (American Fork, Utah, 2017), 81-82
