From Chieko Okazaki:
We are commanded to pray, urged to pray, and promised absolutely that prayer will give us what we seek. The scriptures are full of miracles about answered prayers; but our personal lives, even though they contain examples of answered prayers, often give us painful examples of seemingly unanswered prayers or postponed prayers. Are we being told two things when only one of them can be true? I think one of the answers may lie in what I call “sparrow prayers.
Sparrow prayers are the little prayers that the Lord can answer when granting our request to the greater prayers is not possible. Despite our Faithfulness, the Lord may not reverse the course of a crippling cancer that is slowly taking the life of a beloved mother or brother. But he may be able to grant a prayer for a good night’s sleep or a pain-free afternoon. He may not grant the prayer of a righteous woman for marriage, but he may teach her the very real pleasures of solitude and give her other companions who are also valiant and honorable. ~Chieko N. Okazaki (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013),p.269
