Very interesting! Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

I highlighted this but because it reminded me of a personal anecdote. In my early years of high school, I always kept an “object of hate”, usually an individual that I didn’t like because they were getting female attention that I desired. It was never overtly malicious. Just someone I could entertain certain thoughts of kicking them in the nuts or something, never actually doing it or desiring to do it. Just enough to feed my inner puberty demon.

Well, one of those guys started attending my church and was active with me in our youth group. I found I could no longer harbor such feelings towards him, even if I still thought he was a smug bastard. He wasn’t really, just awkward like any other teenager.

Just thought I’d share that personal story.

As for your conclusion on prayer being meant to change us, you are completely spot on. Even if we don’t consciously pray for that to happen, the very act does change us nonetheless. We pray for a thing to happen, then as a result we expect that thing to happen, so we begin searching for signs that it did or is in fact happening. Making the prayer explicitly aligns our cognitive biases to see the things that we pray for. And there are certain schools of thought that it can create real physical changes in the works beyond our neurology, but I’ll leave that alone for now.