Jesus’ ministry happened between the ages of 30 and 33, so it seems fitting day 33 is about age and time. I spoke last time about my origin story, and whether I’d want to go back and change it. Yes and no, which is true with a lot of aspects of life.

If I was offered the chance to go back and live parts of my life again with the benefit of hindsight, would I seize or squander the chance? If I could go back to the start of university life knowing who I’d become once I got to know myself, I could live my whole life differently from then, with the confidence to live transly, asexually and non-binarily from 2003 onwards. I was at an arts college in the middle of nowhere doing creative writing, so I think I’d be in a positive environment for doing so. If I could go back to any era with confidence and a bit of gusto, I could do my life better. I often think, if I was able to go back to my school days, or university days, and actually pay attention and play the game of ticking boxes and getting marks, I could do pretty well academically, which I didn’t, particularly, the first time around.

I’ve always told myself this: if I could just go back in time and work at things, how prosperous I could be! But I’ve been telling myself that for half my life, and what I only recently realised was I should be applying that thought in the here and now. Pretend you’ve come back in time to Lent 2022, or whenever you’re hearing this, and pretend this is your second chance, and work hard now. Because hard work is easy, at least in my abstract imagination it is. I live my life doing things slightly and somewhat and haltingly. As much as I would like to go back in time to fix that in the past, I would do better by doing it in the present.

Time-travel doesn’t exist, of course, though at the start of my trans journey I often wished, and even idly prayed, that I could wake in a far earlier portion of my life, a girl, and take things from there, with or without hindsight, and be glad of it. I knew it was a prayer not to be granted, because time-travel is not a thing that seems to exist in Christianity, which is good, because the theological discussions involved would be boring and pedantic, and in fact it wouldn’t really be theology - it would be sci-fi speculation.

God is outside of time. That is what ‘eternal’ means, and I think any attempt to try and work out a logic for what that means on cause and effect, and his knowledge of the future and destiny and free-will likewise runs the risk of resembling science-fiction logic, but wouldn’t get close to the incomprehensible truth. It’s like any attempt to draw or imagine or dramatise the Book of Revelation and connect it to our everyday lives. It departs from being theology, and becomes science-fantasy, using limited human what-ifs to determine something that is so far outside of science that our way of thinking cannot grasp it. We see through a mirror darkly. We build lumpen models of what-iffery. Trying to work out God’s position outside of time and what it means, is a hiding to nowhere. I pray for ambulances, both because they need prayer and because I don’t know the road conditions, I don’t know the predicament of the patient. Some of my prayer is for what happens right now, but some of it is about things that have already occurred, which I only feel I can pray about because I don’t yet know it, like having a lottery ticket and missing the results. Even though the results have been decided, you can still pray you might win, because you don’t know the result, so from your perspective it hasn’t happened yet.

It’s a messy example. Prayer doesn’t win people the lottery. If it did, we’d overwhelmingly see it in the stats. Christians won again! Besides which, a quick million pounds could save you in one way and ruin you in another. It’s a mixed blessing.

But looking at the innards of prayer or the innards of time in these ways is like trying to look up someone’s nostril. There’s plenty up there, but your angle keeps you in the realm of snotty speculation. So many questions which seem like topics for a smug theological debate are actually just questions applying logic to the unknowable and coming out with silly answers.

The classic question is ‘could God make a rock so big that God couldn’t lift it?’, which isn’t really a question about God at all. It’s ‘God’s power is infinity. Is infinity bigger than infinity’, which is a mathematical question not one which tells you anything whatever about God. I do have my own answer to that, and I doubt I’m the only one to have come up with it: ‘can God make a rock so big God can’t lift it?’ could be generalised to ‘can God place a limit on himself that he must obey’, to which the answer is a definite yes: he came to earth as a human, victim to all human weaknesses and pains, and he had to die, in great agony, no matter how he wished to avoid it. He got better, but that’s another story.