s a Christian I believed that my prayers were not only heard by god but that my prayers were important enough to initiate action.  As with any Christian, my basis for believing this was not grounded in reality but in scripture:

John 14:12,13
Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.  And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

Clearly, the quotes attributed to Jesus define prayer as a sort of tangible, telepathic request which (in Jesus’ name) will be heard and granted if the person praying has even the slightest bit of real faith.  Jesus describes the amount of faith necessary in Matthew 17:20 as a mustard seed (long considered the smallest seed).  That’s not a whole lot of faith, by anyone’s standards.  However, if this amount of faith is attainable why aren’t more prayers answers and more miracles performed/observed?  The answers to these questions don’t come easy (to a rational mind) but I’ll detail the Christian thought process — or, at least, the thought process as I understood it while I was a Christian — and give my best answer.