Time Travel by Ben Maki

Yesterday, as I was deep in concentration over some new problem that had cropped up in our soon-to-be-released redesigned website, Laura came in to ask a favor.  “There’s a family here to visit the grounds and I need someone to take them around,” she asked. “You’re the only one available.”  Generally, it takes me a few minutes to switch to people mode when I’ve been coding web pages all day, but when the woman who hands you your check every other week asks a favor…well…

The family turned out to be from Utah and they had come all the way to Prescott for a whirlwind one day tour of all that was special to grandpa when he lived here as a boy.  Grandpa himself was leading the tour and from the smile on his face as we climbed into the golf cart I could tell this was going to be a fun trip.

Our first stop was the Chapel.  After a family picture outside the door, he stepped inside and began describing in detail how it had looked so long ago.  “There were pews and the front was on the end, over here.  There was a banner on the wall that said ‘I can do all things through Christ’ above the stage.  And I was sitting right here when I gave my life to the Lord.” He was standing right under the left projector, surrounded by chairs facing the wrong way and staring at a blank, banner-less wall, but you could tell that the decision he’d made so long ago on that very spot hadn’t changed at all.

Now I was born in the ‘70’s, so when people talk about coming to camp in 1948, it falls into that realm of history sometime after the Romans, but before the VCR.  And the difference between that time and this one seems like an impossibly long time.  But as we continued the tour (his level of excitement rising to an almost giddy level when he discovered his cabin is still—barely—standing), I was reminded of something a pastor once said to me.  “I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, starting from a very young age.  What I was going to be, where I was going to live, what I was going to do.  But there is only one decision that has stuck with me for all these years: the decision to follow Christ.  I don’t know how, but I am who I am because of that decision.”

Like I said, I’m working on a new web site.  We just built a new dining hall.  We’ve got grandiose plans to make this place as unrecognizable in another 60 years as it is now compared to back then.  But nothing excites me more than this:  that when my own childhood joins the Roman Empire in ancient history, my work here will have helped people know the One Who Never Changes and who will still be loving me.