I never meant to insinuate that anyone should stop praying; no indeed!
It has been my experience that if God's answers to your prayers has been "no" for a very long time, God is usually trying to indicate another path for your prayer to take; that your prayers are asking for something God would rather you not ask for. (No matter how much the child asks for a cobra, the loving Father will not give it to him.) When you finally give in and look for other options, look for God's alternative to your plans, things tend to start looking up again, and the "yes"s flow again.

I am very often guilty of this kind of pride. I was a physics major at a top school, but doing poorly because I was drastically struggling with the higer level math, struggling with my depression a lot, always concerned about the money to pay for the school... it sucked. But I was praying all the time for God to help me to be able to understand, to change me so that my passion for understanding the way God's beautiful world through physics could be realized. I prayed for God to lead me to a teacher, lead me to that subtle leap in understanding, lead me to just be able to scrape by even. But class after class was worse and worse. I got teachers who were harder and harder, with horrible accents I couldn't follow while spending so much brain power on just understanding the class information. The classes with the good teachers always got cancelled or full, or limited to freshmen only. I couldn't get around it by learning the material via another class, I never could find books like I had found on other math subjects to teach myself. I lost my scholarships because of the grades. Eventually I had to face the fact that God was not supporting the continuing of my physics degree. God wanted me to leave that school, leave most of the friends there, and go to another school and study psychology. Now that I've switched, I've made friends quickly, I've become an officer in the new GSA, the entire psychology department knows me by name in only 2 semesters (and I've only had half of them in class), I've found a church that will be accepting of me when I come out, I'm less depressed, less stressed, less worried about money. My life is by no means "fixed" or anything nice like that, but I no longer feel like I'm fighting the world at every turn. I feel like the world is saying "Yes" now. And that's actually God speaking.

When I put aside my pride, my trying to make God change me when God was trying to tell me God had other plans for me, and I started letting God guide me, things improved a bit. I felt like I was at least moving forward: hope returned to my life because I was no longer trying to invoke God's Name against God's own Will. I was no longer using God's Name in vain. That is what I'm getting at. The right prayer is "Not my will, but yours be done".

In Christ,
~CSL