Willing to Ask

More from Jean Lafrance's Give Me a Living Word:

You are willing to ask, but you want to have alternative solutions in case your supplication does not "work".  That is precisely why your supplication does not have this desperate power which overturns mountains and casts them into the sea.  You withhold an alternative solution and you do not yield yourself totally to this prayer of petition.

I would add to Fr. Lafrance's words that we often also lack, in addition to abandonment to God's solution to our problem, abandonment to God's plan, which might include our problem.  Of course, both deficits are merely instances of the same attitude that says, "Do my will," rather than, "Father, not my will, but yours," (Lk 22:42).