Praying for the past

So I got this random awesome idea while reading the scriptures one day. I was reading about how the Lamanites were losing many of their sons and daughters because they were dissenting and joining the Gadianton robbers and stuff. I kind of felt sorry for them, and then I had this thought: Why don't you pray for them? The very next thought I had was, Am I seriously allowed to do that?!?! So I did. I also figured that as long as I'm praying for them, I might as well pray for Nephi and Captain Moroni and Jesus suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. It felt strange praying for things that I already knew the outcome of, and sometimes I wondered whether my prayer was actually changing anything because it was in the past. But I kept it from being completely awkward by using something I learned from my Book of Mormon teacher last semester. One of my favorite lectures of his was how God sees all things in the present, even though temporally it seems to be divided into past, present, and future for us. He talked about Mormon compiling a second set of records for a purpose that he did not know, and the purpose was that Martin Harris would lose the 116 pages of the Book of Lehi that contained important doctrine for the Lord's people in the last days. The professor did an amazing job of demonstrating how the Lord can move through time just as easily and deliberately as we can move through space. One thing I learned from this is that we should never doubt things that don't make sense to us, even if they are never even reconciled in our lifetime. Think about Mormon. He was commanded to make a second set of plates, and the reason for that (for us, at least) would not come to pass for thousands of years! Another thing that is made possible by the Lord's ability to see all things as one is that cause and effect can be completely inverted. Think about it. Martin Harris's losing the 116 pages was the cause, which came about 1500 years after the effect: Mormon compiling a second set of records. I don't see how there's any room for doubt about the fact that the Lord's ways are higher than ours, because we don't exactly have the ability to see all things in the present, much less change them. We as God's children must learn to accept all things that happen to us, however unfair or confusing they may seem, because even though we may never find the reason for it in this life, there is ALWAYS a reason, and learning to align our will with God's is just one of the things that we can do to show our love to Him.