A pastor says that you should pray for more important things than your headache to go away!

So he said, "When you have a headache, do you pray for God to take it away? The answer was no. I take two aspirin and pray for more important things." But prayer is an attitude often expressed in words but it does not have to be. The Bible says pray always which means keep connected to God all the time for connection is communication and relationship. You might not ask for the headache to go verbally but in a sense you still ask. Or are we to believe the pastor's outlook was, "God let the headache go or stay or whatever - don't get involved do something better instead maybe get more people to vote against abortion"? No. The pastor was afraid that if people pray for too many things they will realise prayer does not work. Pastors like fortune-tellers have people vaguely expecting general things to happen. Being too specific will only lead to them being noticed for the charlatans they are.

God's mysterious ways is the excuse for religion saying prayer works even if it clearly does not.  If your cries to God for help are for naught then the mystery explanation is out. That is because you can explain it by saying God does not listen, is hard-faced, useless, fictitious or the mystery is how you think you are a valuable person but you are not. Once you talk about mystery you have to admit you don’t know what the mystery is. You have no right to pick one solution. You confess there are several including some unpalatable ones!

If it is selfish to pray for a good holiday when others starve, the excuse you have is that it is up to God to give you your wish.  And he supposedly knows best.  This is clearly a cover for human nature being selfish for we know what people are like.