Last night Marti and I watched the first of a new two-part PBS series on JFK. Most of it contains television and news footage from the time. It was eerie, like reliving part of your life. For baby boomers like us, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the seminal event of our early life. We were seeing what we had seen for the first time, live, 50 years ago on our brand new black and white TVs.

Never has one event so affected the corporate life of a nation as did this one. One bullet; one bullseye we all wanted to take back. The Kennedys had captured the imagination of a new  generation and one split-second changed all that. I remember the huge desire I had to turn back the clock. Roll that Zapruder film one more time and hope that this time the bullet misses it’s mark, but no. Every time you roll it, you get the same result — the same spray of red and white from his forehead and the same desperate Jackie instinctively crawling out on the trunk of the limo to retrieve part of his brain as if she could put it back and make everything alright again. But we cannot turn back the clock of our experience.

We didn’t understand it then; we don’t understand it now; and when we see part two tonight there will be no new revelation that will finally make sense of it all. We will have the same unanswered questions. What we do have, however is 50 years of history to lay on top of these events.

We have the angry swirl of disillusionment that followed the corresponding assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and plunged a youth culture that might have rallied around any one of these into drugs and despair, and it’s doubtful, had that youth culture not gone wayward in its search for answers, that it would have turned to Christ in such great numbers as it did in the Jesus movement of the early ‘70s. You don’t need Jesus when you’re in Camelot.

We all have events in our own lives we would like to turn back, just as there are hundreds of thousands in the Philippines right now who wish they could turn back the clock on a typhoon. But we can’t. Watch the film again, it will come out the same every time.

Go way back to that moment the first man and woman disobeyed God. Change that story and you have an entirely different world, one where God’s son does not have to die, but that is fantasy, and that is surely one death you don’t want to turn back. That one death turns the clock forward on all who believe — forward to eternal life.

God’s clock marches on. It takes into account the things we wish we could change and wraps them up into part of His plan. Even the most horrific of events God can recover. We’ve seen this too many times to not believe it can happen again.