Time Travel

I am from the future. Well, I'm not really from the future, but I am returning from having visited the future. 10 hours into the future, to be exact. For the past two weeks, I have been experiencing life 10 hours in advance of most of you. I see the sun 10 hours earlier. I eat dinner around the time most of you are eating breakfast. When your watch says 8:27, and the birds are chirping, mine says 6:27, and the mosquitos are out. Also, the humans are dead, and everyone dances either the robot, or the robo-boogie.

Talk about time-travel. I think I know what it feels like to be an astronaut in one of those movies where they freeze themselves or enter into hibernation for years and years while the spaceship travels on auto-pilot to a distant galaxy 100 light years away. When they get there, they will not have aged at all, and yet everyone they know back home on Earth will be dead and gone. Not that I expect you all to be dead and gone upon my return. It's just that I feel like I've been frozen in time for hours and hours on this bloody plane. It's not so much traveling through time as it is traveling over time. I left Eldoret early this morning for a 6 hour bus ride to Nairobi. Upon arriving in Nairobi, we got in a taxi for a 2.5 hour ride to the airport that would have taken 20 minutes if it hadn't been for the traffic. Then, the first of three flights. It's 9 hours from Nairobi to Amsterdam, 9 more hours from Amsterdam to Detroit, and 5 hours from Detroit to LA. Including a total of at least 8 hours of waiting in between the bus, the taxi, and each flight, by the time I land, I will have spent at least 40 hours traveling. I wonder which planet I will be on when this spaceship finally arrives.

I've been thinking about how different life would be knowing exactly what the next 10 hours would look like. Stress would drop significantly. I would never miss a sweet photo opportunity. In fact, I would never miss a sweet photo opportunity anywhere in the world within 10 hours of where I am. I would know what you're going to say before you say it, and I would CRUSH at poker. I would know when Jesus is coming, and just pray really hard, read the bible, and feed homeless people for 10 hours before He gets here. All in all, I would be way cooler. But it would stink. All of the beautiful things about life would be eradicated. No more mystery. No more discovery. No more reason for hope. In Africa, the experience of the present is enhanced, because it's more difficult, and more futile, to anticipate the future. Nothing goes as planned, so why plan? You really do discover more when you're not thinking about the next thing. Wherever you go, there you are. I doubt that abundant life was meant to be characterized by always knowing what happens next. So why do we try so hard to ensure that there are never any surprises? Living moment to moment means allowing someone else - someone bigger - to be in charge of the next moment. That's abundant life. Knowing the future isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Yet I really do feel like I'm returning from the future. Not 10 hours, but 10 years into the future. Over the last two weeks, I have seen what my life could be like - what I hope it will be like - with God's blessing. I have discovered not only new places on the globe, but new places within my heart. I have lived not only in the community of the world, but in the community of the Kingdom of God. I have been a servant, and I have been served. I have seen the potential that life can hold when it is full of God. Now I am returning to life as I have known it, and in a way, I am going back in time. Back to familiar work. Back to familiar play. Back to my bed, my car, my stuff. Back to traffic, back to parking tickets, back to letters from the IRS. I am going back to the life I know and leaving behind the life I hope to know - or am I leaving it ahead?. Though I am going back, I am not going all the way back. When I return to the present day, it will be two weeks later, and that means I don't have to return precisely to where or when I was when I left. With God's help, I can retain some of this future life, and continue to live it. I don't have to trade hope realized for hope to come. I can live with a little bit of the future in my back pocket, and a flux capacitor in my head. I can bring a hoverboard back to 1985. It shouldn't require a trip to the future to head in that direction.