I've always had some awareness of a power or consciousness controlling everything and started praying regularly very early in life. I was raised Christian and thought of myself as that, although I found out later that what I thought I was being taught in Sunday School was totally different from what Christian doctrine actually was. I was essentially taught about a god who certainly does love human beings but with the "love" of a parent for a son or daughter who had messed up early in life and the parent never misses a chance to remind their child of it and hold it over their head.
Later on, I got involved in New Thought churches (Religious Science and some Unity) and they essentially have a concept of a non-theistic God although RS emphasizes that more than Unity. That led me into a type of prayer where you first concentrate on there being one creative consciousness that has created everything and is always in the process of creation in the life-death-life cycle. After that, if you're praying about something specific, you don't ask like you're asking a boss for a day off but rather focus on the divine mind, creative intelligence or whatever you want to call it working through you for the best outcome. It's the same if you're praying for another person or for the world generally.
I know this sounds vague, but I can't even make myself want to believe anymore in a god who is little more than a bad-tempered human being with an insatiable appetite for flattery, and that's essentially the god of my Sunday School days. If such a god exists, I have little to say to him.
As far as the Deity vs. the state of the world is concerned, I no longer believe that there was ever a perfect world where there was no conflict, sickness or death. We now have some knowledge of human communities going back 25,000 years or so and millions of years of nonhuman life before that and not a shred of evidence that this perfect world ever existed for even a nanosecond. The god that I pray to created the universe as it is, and it's working exactly as it's intended to.