It's Changing Time!

Ha ha ha ha! My kids outgrew this by the time they became potty trained, and I was relieved since I did the lion's share of changing diapers; with Sarah I was able to put them in the Diaper Genie which somewhat mollified the smell and I'd have to empty that every two or three days, and by the time I changed Jeffrey's and Sarah's concurrently (those kids of mine who'll start second and third grades Wednesday; and they're just sixteen months and four days apart) it was a matter of keeping them in the garbage which only got taken out twice a week. I don't remember if we used scented bags or not once we moved from our apartment into our house seven years ago.

But ... if we're both the same man ... how can we co-exist at the same moment in eternity?

Ah, comic books. When they're well-written, they make you think as well as give you a good story. That's what I found in several installments reprinted in Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four volume four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (ISBN 9780785145660) which reprinted that super-team's second annual as well as issues thirty-one through forty. These stories from 1964 and 1965 tell "for the first time!" the origin of Doctor Doom -- the quote above's from when Doom drifting in space meets Rama-Tut, a time traveler who masqueraded as an Egyptian pharaoh and also got smacked down by Mister Fantastic, the then-Invisible Girl, the Human Torch, and the Thing.

His tone of voice -- the tone of one who is used to instant obedience! This is no simple crackpot visitor -- I - I cannot refuse him -- !!

After pondering that with their similar bents toward technology and power hunger and time travel that they may be the SAME being or at least one be a descendant of the other (neither's true, but nobody finds that out for decades; I digress) Doom goes back to Earth and wins against the Fantastic Four -- at least he thinks he does -- and then Marvel Comics' earliest super team takes on the Mole Man (again), helps the Sub-Mariner without him knowing it against an undersea warlord, the Invisible Girl and Human Torch encounter their dad, then take on the alien Skrulls and then the Frightful Four followed by Doctor Doom AGAIN with Daredevil's help. Somewhere in all this, Mister Fantastic and Invisible Girl get engaged and life happens. It feels all so real.

Even without your fabled super powers, I would never want to have you for an enemy, Richards!

Christianity and time travel don't often go together, but last night the family and I (after our morning church service and potluck following outdoors at the Scandinavian Heritage Park and cleaning out our house's basement) watched another DVD I'd gotten before the weekend, the 2002 movie Time Changer about Russell Carlisle, a professor at Grace Bible Seminary in 1890 whose planned book and manners portray commandments such as do not lie, do not steal, do not kill as simply good morals -- which they are -- but without a spiritual foundation in Jesus Christ. A colleague of Carlisle's invites him to his home one night and displays a time machine his father invented, and Carlisle is given the change to see the impact of his professed beliefs on the then-future year 2000.

No man should know his own fate.

Perhaps not the most dynamic film we'll ever watch, but unnerving at a few points without being horrific. Consider when Carlisle rushes out of a movie theatre and shouts to the lobby workers they must stop showing it because a character in the movie "blasphemed the Lord's name!" After that, Jeffrey turned to us and said he's never heard blaspheming -- don't remember how he first said it -- in a movie but he has heard cussing. I had to say with care that YES, he has heard the Lord's name taken in vain ... and that humbled me, at least, for the rest of the movie. The movie ended with Carlisle returning to his own time (1890), revising his text to give Jesus primacy, and the time machine is used again to see how far a person or Bible can go into the future, and nothing seems to go past 2050 at the earliest ...

Time to change me again, David