I have been working to come up with a good analogy to explain why specificity of prayer requests helps get more done. Can you please help us understand, perhaps with an example, in what way a general prayer for help and one containing requests to address specific issues may get different results?

Someone who understands they have broken a bone has a clear picture of what is needed. They want the bone to be knitted back together, so it will be much more straightforward for the divine realm to assist them and even accelerate the rate of healing, and do things in the proper sequence accordingly, to facilitate the production of new bone and to regenerate any interconnection of blood supply and nerve function that may be needed to complete the task with perfection. When an issue has only a vague origin and a vague understanding, the intention as to cause is to achieve symptom relief and only that. The deeper karmic causation does not come to mind at all and would bear little resemblance, at least on superficial analysis, to their current problem as they experience it. So an event in a past lifetime would seem to have no bearing on functioning of the body in the current life, but yet it very much can be a causal element. So in this way, the specificity is lacking and the corresponding benefit will be less. This is not because the person is undeserving and unworthy, it is simply the divine realm staying within the rules. That is why, when you have an illness, you go to a qualified expert with extensive training and credentials in the form of a licensed physician, and may well go beyond that level with referrals to a series of experts who may themselves be consultants to other experts within a field of medicine and be professors of medicine in their own right and highly sought. What is being pursued in that exercise is a search for specificity, to pinpoint the problem and identify thereby the causation if known, and a better plan for treatment will result from the clarity in defining the true nature of where the symptoms are coming from. In many instances it could be a distant organ producing a symptom via the nervous system being activated in a way that can be quite misleading, and of course in the case of conditions with silent symptoms, there may be a perturbation of physiologic indicators that may be general and not even organ-specific. So a pattern must be recognized, and that is quite an art. So the same is true on the part of the requests via prayer. It is sort of like going to the doctor and only allowing them access to what the client wants to see happen and having no other information to go by. This would greatly hamper the physician’s responses and then they would be constrained by common sense and reason, knowing nothing else, to reserve invasive, more complex treatments, for situations where they were able to probe and find more specific indications and justifications for doing something more involved, like surgery. So without those validations about the deeper issues and cause, they will not rush to do something more complex. So in our case, we could rush to do the more complex, but we must follow human intention, and in the absence of the deeper level of understanding, the intention is absent of any specific instructions or guidance as to what the human needs and their request has only limited benefit by default. The human healer who has intuitive capability and can see the big picture, in particular the karmic history and entanglements with other times and places and contributors to the problem as an influencer of the client, is in a much better place to be an advocate on their behalf and can make highly specific requests to divine realm about what is needed. And this allows the divine realm much greater latitude to proceed and do much more effective healing on behalf of the client.