time travel...

I asked my friends on Facebook recently how they felt about time travel, particularly how time travel, if possible, would change our lives.  The replies were interesting.  One man made mention of the danger of time travel and the potential that we would want to go back in time and be rid of our past choices and problems that caused us pain, leaving the needed lessons unlearned. 

I truly believe that it is within the storms of life where the most character, integrity, and wisdom is formed in us.  If we could travel back in time and revisit the worst of times in our lives, I wonder if we would find more insight and acumen that we could have acquired that would strengthen our character and integrity…altering of course, potential bad decisions we would make in the future.  In other words, what lessons did we potentially miss in past privation?  Interesting question.

I find that this is the beauty (if there is one) in journaling and blogging.  I revisit often past journal entries, some of which are over twenty years old, to find nuggets of discovery in adverse times of my past.  So I suppose, journaling and blogging can actually supply a form of time travel.  This reminds me of when people would sit with the elderly (grandparents, etc) and hear them tell stories of times past.  I had the privilege of doing this with an elderly couple in Germany while visiting that beautiful country in 1984.  They spoke from a German perspective of the Holocaust.  Tears flowed as they both spoke of sheltering and harboring Jews from Hitler’s regime, and their constant fear of being found out.  They spoke of the pain and suffering of so many.  The wisdom was just dripping from this elderly couple.  This too, is a form of time travel and a way to gain a clearer perspective and needed knowledge from painful moments in the past.  Time travels in these forms do have the power and ability to change our lives.  I believe this is why God demanded early on from His people to “remember.”  There is much pain from the past that we should never forget, because it has an eternal potential to build within us life’s goods, if we allow it of course.