Occasionally, someone who is neither religious nor spiritual asks for our prayers for some temporal or earthly need. In doing so, they highlight a sometimes mercenary and self‑seeking tendency in our own approach to seeking God’s help. For although we value—and are even grateful for—whatever help God grants us, we can be adept at simultaneously shirking the responsibilities incumbent upon those who claim to love him. In other words, we are often more interested in what God can do for us than in who God is for us—a loving Father who, amazingly, desires our love. The Israelites, in their campaign against the Philistines, illustrate this tendency. Despite their infidelity to the responsibilities of their covenantal relationship with God, they make no amends but simply try to manipulate God by bringing his sacred ark to the battlefield. To their dismay, however, they discover that God cannot be coerced or shamed into action on their behalf. This suggests that some prayers go unanswered not because we ask for the wrong thing, but because we do not ask within a relationship of mutual love and respect. And it is prayer for the gift of this relationship of mutual love that God will unfailingly grant—and that will then enable him to freely bestow those lesser gifts bound up with our daily and earthly needs.