“Therefore, ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you; for he that asketh, receiveth; and unto him that knocketh, it shall be opened.” (3 Nephi 27:29). An interesting part of the Savior's promise that if we ask we shall receive is that He does not specify that we will receive what we asked for. God will not give us something that is bad for us, nor will He give us something that we are not ready for. But every sincere and faith-filled prayer is guaranteed to be answered and we shall receive something every time that we ask, even if what we receive does not always look anything like what we asked for. The Lord does not want to punish us if we pray or ask for things that don't align with His plan for us. It is much more important that we pray at all than that we pray correctly. The more often that we pray and ask and receive, the better we will grow to understand the mind and the will of the Lord through the things He gives us. In the grand scheme of things, we will realize that whenever we received something different from what we asked, what the Lord gave us instead was always better. In this way, through a consistent pattern of asking and receiving, we will slowly change what we ask for so that we will no longer ask amiss but will always receive exactly what we asked for, because we will always ask for the exact thing that God has prepared for us.
