About Time

Someone asked me today if I wish I had been a father sooner. The natural inclination would be to answer, “of course I do!” But the truth is that I don’t. Because in my mind, an exact chain of events had to come together to produce my exact son. So if I had been a father sooner, then I wouldn’t have had my son exactly as he is. And that wouldn’t work for me. I wouldn’t change him one bit.

There was a movie a few years back called “About Time.” It followed a man that had the ability to go back in time and relive moments from his life. He discovers that he could make different decisions and change the future moments of his life. During one scene, his sister gets in a car accident and is in the hospital badly hurt. He decides to go back in time and change the decisions she had made that led to that moment. Unfortunately, when he does so, his little baby girl becomes unborn and is replaced with a little baby boy instead. When he asks his father about this, who also had the ability to travel back in time, he finds out that some things require a certain configuration of life to produce, and making changes to the past will alter the configuration and change it to something different. So at those milestones, he’s unable to make changes before the event happened. Which means to keep his daughter, he can’t help his sister avoid the pain of her life. Faced with the choice, he decides to keep his daughter.

When the person asked me today about being a father sooner, I thought of this movie. I wouldn’t trade my son to avoid the pain in my life. I have to trust that God had a plan all along, it was supposed to happen this exact way at this exact time. And the result of that was getting my exact son.