As I've discerned these types of prayers, they're perhaps one of the most consistent prayer practices in America. You know the sort, I'm sure. "Lord, I just want you to ..." "God, we just need ..." "Jesus, if you would just ..."
What these prayers actually do, of course, is affix an adjective -- just -- that essentially minimizes the very petition of the prayer. So the question left to ask is: Why would we want to minimize God's activity in the world? Why diminish the very thing we're asking God to do?
That simple qualifier, while probably nothing more than a verbal "filler" -- allowing our mouths to get ahead of our hearts and brains in prayer -- betrays a false humility. We think it makes God's response more special or meaningful. But in reality, adding the word "just" to our prayer, really betrays the sorts of Epicureanism that silent pervade in our culture.
I can't count the number of people that, when pushed, perceive that God, once upon a time, created the world, then sort of went away, back into heaven. And from time to time, God then steps in and does a miracle, or becomes incarnate, but they're still essentially living with the idea that the world and God are separate. And that God only stoops into the world in order to do some spectacular feat.
Thing is, that's Epicureanism, not Christian faith. When you have God and the world being separate, with God occasionally intervening or not, as the case may be, then you encourage people who say, "Well, God may have made this show in the first place but then it actually just runs on its own steam thereafter. So we have to prayer that God might 'just' do this or that thing for us".
There's a long poem written by Lucretius -- On the Nature of Things -- that's had more of an impact of how we perceive the modern world than lots of us appreciate. And it infects our prayers every time we use the word "just".
This is why I think the Psalms are so significant. They train us in the language of biblical prayer. The Psalms insist that God's domain and our domain are interactive -- and according to the New Testament this is doubly true because in the Incarnation, heaven and earth are reunited. God bounces around our world. We don't have to ask him to intervene. This is why life, for Christians who pray, is so messy, confusing and exciting.
Of course, part of the problem here is that we don't like the idea of working at our prayers. Christian prayer is a discipline that must be learned. The disciples implore Jesus, "Lord, teach us to pray". And the prayer that Jesus gives in response -- "The Lord's Prayer" -- is another of those disciplines (like the Psalms) that hone our ways of praying to make us Christian, not Epicurean. But we'd rather our prayers be "spontaneous" in order to be "spiritual". What that really means, of course, is that we want our prayers to be nothing more than a kind of spiritual navel-gazing.
Relationships are messy precisely because they are so much work. How could we expect our relationship with God the Father made known in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit to be any less messy or any less work?
I can't stand it when people use the word "just" in their prayers. Because there's so much more going on in those prayers than "just" talking to God.