What would we see?

Can you imagine what would happen if you could somehow take someone from say…the late 1700’s and transport them into today? My sister and I used to imagine just such a thing. We would imagine bringing someone forward from their time to ours. We would then imagine what their reaction would be to certain things.

How would someone that has never experienced electricity react to being able to flip a switch and create light?

What would they think with their first glimpse of a vehicle?

How would they react to indoor plumbing?

What about a microwave? Coffee pot? Cell phone? How about T.V.? A radio? Modern day clothes? A washing machine?

There are so many things that we can imagine would baffle someone coming from the past to our modern times. And we can easily imagine what those things would be.

But I have to wonder what would baffle them more, the very modern inventions…things they couldn’t begin to imagine in their time…or the moral and religious state of people today. As much as we may think they would marvel over our ‘modern conveniences’, it could very well be something very different that would confound them.

So much of what we see as ordinary…even if we don’t like it…would be dumbfounding to people from a different time. How many babies are born to single mothers every day? They say the number is somewhere around one out of every two. To a person that lived in a time when pretty close to 100% of all children were born to married parents…how astounding would they be with the way our country sees unwed parenthood?

Several years ago I had someone tell me that the majority of the people in jail in Saudi Arabia are unwed mothers and that the reason they’re in jail is because they are unwed mothers. What must people from countries with laws like those think of the numbers of unwed mothers in our country? And how much worse would someone to whom unwed parenthood was nearly unheard of think?

How would they respond not to the movies that are so easily attainable in our country but to the content of those movies? What would they think of the sin and moral depravity depicted in those movies? How would they respond at the ease in which the Lord’s name is taken in vain time and time again in those movies? How would they respond to the same thing happening in the people they pass in town?

What would they think of a country that kills its own unborn babies? How would they respond to meeting a woman that had had an abortion?

What would they think upon sitting in one of our country’s Sunday services in any of our ‘church’ buildings? Being taken straight from their time to ours…what would they see in those services? Would they hear Truth in the sermon being delivered or would they be able to easily pick out all the twisting and changing the preacher does? Would they feel ‘moved’ and ‘led to worship’ by the music or would they stand in shock at the concert being put on before them?

If we could see our world through the eyes of someone coming into it from a more moral time, a time when Truth may have been a little more prevalent…what would we see?