Acts 12:5, 16 — Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him. …

… But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened the door, and saw him, they were astonished.

We have an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God. We have a God who has plans to do us good. We have a God who ensures that all things work together for the good of them that love Him. So why are we amazed when He does things for us when we ask Him to?
Here’s an example of the sort of thing I mean. A few years ago, Myra and I were called to England, at short notice, for an immigration process. When we got to the embassy we were given a list of the documents we were supposed to have. Now I promise you we had prepared diligently, but there was one on the list we hadn’t been warned about and hadn’t got. What were we to do? We did the only thing we could. We prayed, cried out to the Lord, desperately. The next day our interview was a breeze. The agent who interviewed us hardly looked at our papers. We knew God had intervened … And we were amazed.
Have you had those experiences, where you prayed, the Lord responded, and you were amazed? So what is it with us? Have we so little faith?
Don’t feel to bad. We share our inability to connect our prayer to God’s action with those who were at the very start of the church. It’s what the two verses I’ve pulled out of chapter 12 of Acts point to.
Herod Agrippa I had seized and executed John the Apostle (brother of James — they were Jesus’s “sons of thunder”). The Jewish authorities had greeted the move with enthusiasm, so he had decided to repeat the dose with Peter.
The church were praying without ceasing for Peter. Actually, a better translation would be “fervent” — it is translated to suggest that kind if earnestness in the only three other places it’s used in the New Testament — 1 Peter 1:22 and 4:8 and Luke 22:44. They were praying fervently and yet when the servant girl Rhoda tells them Peter is at the door they tell her she’s seeing ghosts, and when they see him for themselves they’re astonished. They were amazed that God had done what they were asking Him to!
I don’t think the problem is lack of faith. I think it might be that we really don’t quite understand how God feels about us. We love to call Him Abba — Papa — but it’s hard for us truly to grasp that He loves to not just call us children but to have us, and treat us, as beloved children.
Go ahead, ask … but try not to be so surprised when He answers!