Call me crazy. I fantasize about going back in time, enabled by the Lord somehow and doing it within some divine mission, but having conversations with various people--or at least watching them play out history. (I love time-travel movies and always have.) For instance, I think about going back to my home town (Annandale, VA) which lay in the path of several early Civil War battles. I would go to the place where my own neighborhood would someday lay. (I could easily find it.) I would stand in those woods or that field and watch the Union army retreat down the road nearby after defeats at First and Second Manassas.

I imagine showing up in front of my Dad (like the end of the film Field of Dreams) while he exits Buchenwald concentration camp, April 1945. I can imagine his state of shock, as a first-liberator. I would identify myself as his son, to be born seven years in the future. I would lift his spirits, tell him there was much to live for, that the war was nearly over (though he would have known that.) I would tell him of his grand-daughters--four decades in the future.

I often wonder what it would be like to be given a couple of days in Judea when Jesus was there...to hang out in Capernaum just after Peter's mother-in-law was ill. Or to be in Ephesus when Paul visited. (Archaelology appeals to people like me for these dreamy reasons.)

I would love to walk beside Martin Luther as he makes his way back to Saxony after the Diet of Worms. I wonder what he would be muttering to himself. And as I appeared (and of course the Lord would enable me to speak in 16th century German) I would encourage him that although things so often seem dark, in God's gracious providence his efforts would bear much fruit.

Call me crazy, I know.