What Does Prayer Accomplish?

Here’s a question I wrestled with for a long time:

What does prayer accomplish?

If God already had an immovable plan for mankind before He created the earth, obviously nothing, including prayer, can change circumstance; so what does prayer accomplish? I’ve often heard people say, “Prayer changes things”, but what does it change?

Prayer may not change circumstance, but it changes us. Communicating with the King of kings opens our eyes to see His work, so what we refer to as ‘answered prayer’ isn’t God listening to our requests and deciding to fulfill them; it’s Him working like He always does and opening our eyes to see it. God didn’t give us the option of prayer so we can get the things we want; He tells us to pray so He can conform us to His image and work through us. God works with or without my prayers; they themselves don’t change a thing. What prayer changes is my heart, and that is what God is most concerned about.

Prayer wasn’t created for us to bring God our lists of complaints; it was created so we can have a source of communication with Him. The Bible is full of people going to God with their joys, their burdens, and their questions; if God wanted that recorded for us to read, what does that say about how important prayer is to Him?