At the funfair or on the pier, they have coin pushers, where you put coins in at the top, and they tumble onto a stack of incrementally offset sliding layers. As coins drop, they push existing coins along the sliding layer, and, eventually a few coins are pushed over the edge on the next layer down. Ultimately, some coins will be repaid out of the bottom of the machine.
Now, of course, in real life, the house always wins, so you get less out the bottom than you put in the top.
Prayer and the actions of the programme are like the coins put into the coin pusher. Just like with the coin pusher, considerable patience is required before results are seen. It's heart-breaking to see how little stacks of coins poised perilously on the edge of a sliding layer remain tottering but not falling, no matter how many coins are fed into the top. But eventually whole cataracts of coins cascade down.
The two differences between the relationship with God and the coin pusher are that, ultimately, with God, the individual gets one-hundred-fold more out of the bottom than is put in the top, and, although coppers are fed in the top (which, furthermore, God supplies us with), it is gold that is delivered as the prize.
All that is required of the individual is the courage to keep on with the system of systematic prayer, systematic meditation, and systematic right action, even when nothing appears to be changing. Later than you want, but sooner than you expect, all of the effort and diligence will be repaid, and the words of Psalm 18 come truth:
19 He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.
20 The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.
And from Psalm 126:
They go out, they go out, full of tears, carrying seed for the sowing;
They come back, they come back, full of song, carrying their sheaves.
If you're weeping, sow the seeds anyway. The harvest will not be diminished by the fact of the current sorrow provided that the work is done.