Prayers for Ourself, Not for Our Loved Ones

A common situation where that happens is when people are waiting for the results of a medical test. praying, please let this thing not be medical condition x is implicitly asking god to effect events in your past that have a bearing on whether you get that condition or not. For example, the doctor may have detected a lump in their body that he suspects of being cancer, but they got that lump some time ago. And so one way of understanding the person's prayer is that god would prevent that lump, whatever it is, from being cancerous.