Five minutes ago will pass in five minutes from now...

I've often wondered about prayer. Not how to pray or what it consists of or what it means, but it's power. Something that really blows my mind is the thought of praying for the past. Because God always answers prayer in some form, and God's time is not our time. Nothing is impossible for God, and He already knows what we're going to pray... so does the influence what happens before we pray for it? It's like changing your past by your future. How strange to think about! Like sometimes I'll pray about things and find out later that the situation I was praying for had already occurred by the time my prayer started. So I wonder if the prayer I said whole-heartedly, without the knowledge that what I was praying for had already passed, had an effect of what happened earlier. Does that make sense? Like would things have gone differently if I hadn't ended up praying that specific prayer? I don't know, but I wonder.