jayber knows.

"But the worst day of all was when it hit me that Jesus' own most fervent prayer was refused: 'Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.' I must have read that verse or heard it a hundred times before without seeing or hearing. Maybe I didn't want to see it. But then one day I saw it. It just knocked me in the head. This, I thought, is what is meant by 'thy will be done' in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.

After Jesus' terrible prayer at Gethsemane, an angel came to Him and gave Him strength, but did not remove the cup.

Before that time I may have had my doubts about public prayers, but I had listened to them complacently enough, even when they were for the football team. I had prayed my own private prayers complacently enough, asking for things I wanted, even though I knew well already that a lot of things I wanted I was not going to get, no matter how much I prayed for them.

But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said 'thy will be done,' what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray 'thy will be done' after you see what it means?

And what did these questions do to my understanding of all the prayers I had ever heard and prayed? And what did they do to the possibility that I could stand before a congregation--my congregation, who would believe that I knew what I was doing--and pray for favorable weather, a good harvest, the recovery of the sick and the strayed, victory in war? Does prayer change God's mind? If God's mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him [or Her] at all? And what are we to think when two good people pray for opposite things--as when two devout mothers of soldiers on opposite sides pray for the safety of their sons, or for victory?

...

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty--in my own mind, or in the human lot--of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed--into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call. I wasn't just a student or a going-to-be-preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where."

from the writings of Wendell Berry in the narrative of Jayber Crow

"anxiety is the inability to be present."

what am i anxious about?

1) things not turning out the way i expected them to
2) not being good enough, prepared enough, deep enough, compassionate enough,... not having the answers
3) in 5 years not having realized at least some of the aspects of my idealized hippie dream life... see number 1
4) not living my life to the fullest