> This perspective is crucial, I think. God tells us to pray because prayers are accessible to God at any time. Technically, one could pray now for events that are now past to him or her, and those prayers would affect those events.

So basically God is like Bill & Ted? "Okay, all we gotta do is go back in time, steal my dad's keys, and hide them... in front of that sign. Excellent!"

But this is how it works out if we take frum's interpretation that you can affect events that happened in the past. The problem is, you could not *alter* those events. You'd have to pray for events to happen in the way that you've already experienced them happening. I.e. you couldn't pray for events in the past to be different. It is a total Bill & Ted thing: if you wanted to affect events as they'd happen, you'd just need to remind yourself to pray at a future date, much like B&T just need to remind themselves to use their time-machine at a future date.

Stephen