A "Spooky" Love Story

The movie The Time Traveler's Wife is the story of a man who constantly flips back and forth between time travel and his normal life. He never knows where he will find himself next. You might say it's a love story with a sci-fi twist. The time traveler loves his wife. They were childhood sweetheats. His love reached across time and space from his heart to hers. He misses her when he's off on his travels.

There is a time traveler love story in Acts that has a similar twist. (Acts 8:26-40) Philip is a follower of Jesus and a missionary to the half-breed, social outcasts in Samaria. Philip gets a message from an angel to take a walk on a specific road and go a certain direction. He encounters a black man, a eunuch, who is part of the royal court in Ethiopia traveling back from Jerusalem. As this man rode along in his chariot he was reading to pass the time. He chose to read the scroll/book of Isaiah.

Note: This is interesting because it shows God's plan for the continent of Africa. Long before we knew there was a continent or it was named Africa, God knew and was working to bring His Gospel to what has often been called the dark continent. Today the Gospel is growing on steriods in Africa! It is no longer the dark continent to the Gospel.

God's love was reaching across time and space to this man in a chariot to open his eyes and his heart to the good news about Jesus.

In a sense this unnamed man from Ethiopia was reading an ancient love story. Philip climbed up into the man's chariot, rode a ways with him and explained what he was reading to him. The African man believed what he read. When they passed a stream or pond, he asked Philip to baptize him.

Up to this point in the story, God is working outside time and space to change the Ethiopian man's heart. Then the story turns really spooky:

When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away. The eunuch never saw him again ... (vs. 39-40)

It is spooky for us to think someone can just be gone - poof! - and reappear somewhere else far away in the blink of an eye, but this is God's MO (modus operandi - mode of operation). God travels through time and space all the time. In fact, the truth is that God goes even farther than that. God can be more than one place at a time all at the same time which is even more spooky!

God is the True Time Traveler! Like the man in the movie, God is after your heart and mine. He loves each of us enough to travel through time and space to woo and win our hearts and bring us into His forever family! God's love is literally an extraterrestral love affair. AND it's so much more than a nice story. The fact that God is the ultimate Time Traveler means that He is already in the middle of your day today, your day tomorrow and was in the middle of your yesterday! In a word, God is in the middle of your story! Think about it! It's pretty awesome! It's a spooky love story of cosmic proportions!