Monday, July 16, 2007

If I Could Turn Back Time

The other night Jason and I caught a Lifetime movie - one of those movies where you don't purposely sit down to watch but happen to stop at the channel as you're flipping through, and you can also pick it up 30 minutes in and still catch up. I don't even remember the name of it, but once we started watching, we watched until the end. The premise of the movie was this: The main character of the movie had an unknown aunt who died and left her house to this woman. That came out awkward but I don't know how else to type it. Anyway, in this house was an old music box. Every time the woman opened the music box, her reality changed. She didn't travel in time forward or backward, but rather parallel, in a world where her past had been different, thus making her present different, too. Right before this woman had received the house, her husband and only daughter had been killed in a car accident. However, one time when she opened the music box, her new reality was that her husband and daughter were alive - but the "tragedies" of her life were different. She had apparently had an affair with a coworker and was trying to straighten things out with her husband, and her best friend had been killed in a plane wreck. Of course, it took her a few times with the music box and her reality changing for her to figure out what was happening, but once she figured it out, she had a decision to make - stay with her current reality or open the music box, hoping for something better. She was satisfied with the husband/daughter/affair reality, but then her daughter found the box and opened it, and the next morning the new reality was her husband and daughter were gone again and she was just dating her coworker. She didn't like that reality, so she opened the box again, and this time her husband was gone, and her daughter had walking problems due to the accident. Then later in that reality, her daughter went missing, and then she found her daughter but they were being chased, so she opened the music box to get out of the situation, and then the new reality was that she and her husband were in a custody battle over the daughter, and she was the one being accused of kidnapping her child. Well, that's the plot in a nutshell. What we find out is that the aunt who had died and given away the house could not keep from opening the box time and time again, trying to avoid the tragedies of life or change the reality. What happened to the aunt, though, was she changed the reality of her life so many times that by the end, noone knew who she was, and people who knew of her thought she was crazy. Fortunately for the main character, she put an end to the cycle at the end of the movie and destroyed the music box, and like every good Lifetime movie should end, her new reality was the scene right before her husband and daughter had been in the accident, and she was able to change the circumstance so they weren't in the accident after all, and they lived happily ever after.

What would it be like if we had the power to change our reality? Would we choose to exercise that power? Would we excercise the power out of curiosity (my life's boring) or necessity (I want to avoid this tragedy) or regret (if only I had...) Tonight I sit at the computer replaying some different events that have happened in my life over the last week - witnessing a friend with sudden illness, a despondent waitress, a critically injured motorcyclist on the road, the death of a member of our church, the stories on the internet that I read about children with terminal diseases - I'm sure the people these situations directly affected would like to go back and make different choices to alter what their reality became. Wouldn't all of us like to fast forward to the future, see what that looks like, and then come back to the present to try to tweak the future to what we think a happy life should be?

I guess ultimately as a Christian I can say God is in control, and he knows the future, and even if I had the power to change reality, I wouldn't or shouldn't intervene in his master plan. But then where does prayer fit in? I prayed for my sick friend - he's doing well. I prayed for the motorcyclist in the road - he's in critical condition. I pray every night for the sick little girl - she's getting worse. What if the world is just made up of random events that we want to put a label on so we call it God's plan? Does that somehow soothe the tragedies and bless the good fortune? Or is the plan somewhat loosely fitted, and the little things that happen in between are trivial? Maybe these are the things that are negotiable through prayer. I guess I have a lot of questions for when I get to heaven, because there are a lot of things I just don't get. I hope my seven year old doesn't ask the same sort of questions until I get it all figured out.