Dear Omar:

Your question involves the issues of Free Will, God's omniscience, and God's particular will vs. His Permissive Will.

God is changeless. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 3:8). His will never changes. He wills good for us. He wills us to be with Him in heaven. But, God doesn't get His way most of the time. That is, every time we sin, we are violating God's will. He does not want us to sin, but we do. Every time something bad happens to us God's will is not being fulfilled because He wills for us only good.

The reason that God's will is not fulfilled most of the time is because He wills us to have Free Will -- to be able to choose right from wrong. He allows us this freedom. Within his Permissive Will He allows evil to exist, bad things to happen, and sin to reign in our flesh because He loves us so much that He has given us an attribute of God, of Himself -- freedom to choose and to love. Without free will we could not love. Love cannot be forced or offered instinctively. Love must be deliberately chosen.

Thus, God permits evil and sin to be present in this world for the greater good of our Free Will, for the greater good of experiencing and choosing love.

God's particular will, however, is that none of us become victim to demonic evil, personal evil, or material evil. Demonic evil is that perpetrated by demons. Personal evil is that which is chosen by man. Material evil is that by things outside of man's ability to choose (a tornado destroying your house is an act of material evil).

Why ask God for anything? Because He wants us to ask Him. St James teaches us (James 4:2b-3) "You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures."

God, like any Father, takes pleasure when His children ask him for their needs and wants. A father takes pleasure in giving to his children and satisfying their hearts.

It is God's will that we ask him for our needs and wants. His will is that He may not give us something until we ask for it. This is what St. James says. If we ask for the wrong things, or ask with the wrong motivations, then God, as any good father would do, will not grant that request. Any father will say no to a child who wants ice cream for breakfast.

Thus, it is part of the economy of God that He wishes us to ask Him and that He may not give to us until we ask Him.

Your question implies that God has every little second mapped out for us and thus there is no point in praying. This idea is actually called "determinism" in philosophy and is the basic philosophical foundation of John Calvin's theology. In this philosophy and theology man has no free will. If we have no free will then there are no genuine decisions to be made. We just float down the river of life where the current takes us and there is nothing we can do about it. We cannot ask God to rescue us from the raging rapids because the river is God's will and nothing will alter it. This notion is actually a heresy.

We do have free will. If we didn't we would be mere animals.

God has not scripted each second of our lives. He allows us to choose the direction of our lives. But, God KNOWS what we will choose. His advanced knowledge of our choices does not depreciate our ability to choose, it is just that He knows in advance what we will choose.

This is a mystery, but we can see a vignette of this in, for example, a couple who has been married for 50 years. They know each other so well that they can complete each other's sentences and can "know" what each will do before they do it. The fact that the wife knows her husband will behave in a certain way in a certain circumstance does not remove the fact that the husband freely chose to behave the way he did, it merely means that the wife knows him so well that she can accurately predict his behavior. God knows us perfectly.

In your example of a man looking for a job, you make an assumption that it may not be God's will for the man to find a job. How is this God's will? God does not wish bad things on us. To not find a job is to not be able to provide for oneself and one's family. This is not God's will. God will us to to be able to support ourselves in some manner.

Praying to God about getting a job is important because then God can direct our paths to the right job, to the job He would like us to have perhaps. Praying to God can help us to have the right attitude and demeanor in order to secure a job. Even if we apply for a job that God would like us to have, if we mess up the interview we won't get the job. We need to pray to God to ask Him to help us make a good presentation.

But, for sake of argument, let us say that God does not want the man to find a job. How does the man know that? We cannot know what God wants until we ask. If we ask for something that God does not want us to have, He will say no. But, if we do not ask, how do we know?

"You have not, because you ask not." 

It is a cliché: "Go ahead and ask, the worst that will happen is that he will say no, and maybe he will say yes."

I hope this helps some.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary