Legitimate Non-Biblical Question # 1

For those out there that pray, how do you deal with prayer requests?
Here's what I mean: I'm sure we all have requests of God regarding ourselves. We also pray for our immediate families (spouses, children, parents), and then, too, our extended families. Then, you have prayer requests from close friends and sometimes not-so-close friends that you pray for. Of course, we're to pray for our churches, our Sunday Schools, our missionaries, our country, our leaders, etc. And that's all before you go to church and your big group class has a dozen more requests, your small group has requests, your Sunday night Bible Study has requests, and if you go on Wednesdays or other days, you hear more requests there. Our church, which is relatively large, also has a Christian sympathy list so we can pray for people in our church whose loved ones die. Also, our Adult 1, 2, and 3 e-mails are all hooked so that we receive prayer requests during the week. Wheeeeeeeew.

I know I sound like an ingrate, but truly, just in my church and Sunday School class(es), there's more requests than for what I can consistently pray. Some of the answers to this that I've encountered --

1) Our Sunday School in Adult 1 had a prayer book, where our class would write down requests and add to them each week. Every Sunday, a couple would take home that book and pray over each request in it all seven days of the week (if they could but that was the responsibility for accepting it).

2) Shoot a mini-prayer up for every request you hear

3) According to John Ortberg in his book, The Life You've Always Wanted, he tended to advocate a prayer list that I thought was reasonable, which was, at least at first, pray only for those requests near to your heart. Basically, pray about the ones you really care about. I may be missing that a little as it's been a while since I've read it, but I think that's close.

4) Keep lists and supplicate by those lists

For me, and I know everyone is different, all of these are worthy and noble if you can manage, but I'll be honest. I have a hard time even managing any one of these. At our church, a lot of people throw around the term "prayer warriors" and probably justifiably so for a lot of people in our church. I'm not one. Most of the time, if somebody asks me directly to pray for someone else, I will. And most of the time, if I say I'll pray for someone I do. The rest of the time I'm a liar, which isn't a good thing but it's my thing. But I'll readily admit, prayer isn't the easiest thing for me to be disciplined about. I do have that somewhat constant walking and talking to the Lord as I'm going through the day, which doesn't really start or end, but what I'm really talking about here is prayer where you're sacrificing your time to pray for others about specific requests.

My question is pretty basic, and I asked it at the top. How do you handle all the prayer requests you hear? Do you try to pray for them all? The portion of them that really move you because of emotional attachments? It's always interesting and enlightening to discover how other people overcome the problems I have.

Prayer