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Tim was a gifted child. He started to walk at six months of age, talk at one year, and read and write by the age of three. Tim’s father was a graduate professor at the local college where he taught western religion and bible studies. Tim’s mother taught school and Sunday school at the neighborhood church they all attended.

Both Tim’s mother and father loved him very much and encouraged him in all his learning activities. They gave him children’s illustrated versions of the Old and New Testaments with children’s concordances as well as coloring books depicting the most popular parables. Tim got a gold star for every bible verse he memorized and by the time he was six years old, he could quote more than 150 verses.

Tim was seven years old the first time he heard the word of God. It was way past his bedtime on a Sunday night when a noise from his closet woke him up. He padded over to the closet and slowly pulled open the doors. At first he didn’t hear anything and figured he’d been dreaming. He started to pull the closet doors shut when he heard it again. This time it sounded like a muffled voice and it was coming from his toy box.

Very carefully, he lifted the toy box lid just enough for the light to come on and gazed through the crack at the contents inside. “Hello?” he whispered, scanning the contents for the source of the voice. Two of his Wild Thing stuffed animals moved and slid apart and right between them Tim’s Six Million Dollar Man doll stood up and waved. “Hi Tim,” it said. “Are you the Bionic Man?” Tim asked. “No, Tim. I’m God and we’ve got a lot to talk about.

Tim and God stayed up talking most of the night. At some point, Tim got one of his Big Chief tablets from the school supplies shelf on his bookcase and started to write down all the important things God said. He didn’t understand everything God said, even when he stopped him to ask questions. So he just made some notes or drew some pictures whenever he was confused. But he tried to write down as much as he could. He especially liked the songs God taught him.

When morning came and the very first streams of light began washing back the night, Tim excused himself from God. He closed the toy box and closet, returned his tablet to the bookcase, and slipped into bed. He was very excited to be talking to God, but he knew he needed to get some sleep before school.

Tim visited with God almost every night for the next seven years. He was very careful to write down as much as he could, asking questions often and sometimes scratching out one thing to add another. He drew pictures and added diagrams where it made sense. He continued to enjoy the songs that God taught him and learned to read and write music so he could add notes to the songs. Over the years Tim filled 40 Big Chief tablets with God’s words and songs.

In the year 2000, Tim’s Sunday school class teachers decided to bury a time capsule near the Sanctuary. They invited all the children to add their notes, stories, poems and pictures to a stainless steel sphere fashioned by members of the congregation. Tim added a few tablets a day over the course of a few days so no one would notice how much he was putting in the time capsule. God had told him to carefully add all his tablets because they would be very important later.

Finally, the sphere was sealed and buried near the cornerstone of the Sanctuary. A stone and metal sign was placed over the burial site with the day it was buried and the date to be opened written in big letters. Tim checked on it every Sunday to make sure no one opened it early.

Tim was 14 years old when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After all the years of talking to himself and singing songs by himself, his parents finally started to worry and had him examined by a psychiatrist. The doctor visited with Tim over the course of a few weeks and decided that his case was exceptionally bad and that he needed to be admitted to a hospital. The last words that Tim spoke were, “He told me this might happen.”

Tim spent the rest of his life in one institution after another. He never spoke another word, but sometimes if you approached him quietly and carefully, you could hear him singing softly to himself. He carried the Six Million Dollar Man doll from hospital to hospital and sometimes drew pictures when he was given paper. He died when he was 33 years old from unknown circumstances. No foul play was suspected. It just seemed like it was his time to go.

Kla’ Tu was 33 when he found the stone ruins of old times. He was an elder of his tribe and spent most of his time exploring the areas around his village. He had been walking along the dead river bed for a day and a half when he saw the cross from afar. He climbed up the steep slope and hiked through overgrown fields and forest before he found the cross and the deteriorated walls that supported it. As he approached the tallest wall, he noticed a rock on the ground with a metal plate containing several lines of writing. His English was not good, but he could tell something was buried there and that made him curious.

He found strong branches and limbs for digging in the forest nearby. Expecting to dig for hours, he was pleasantly surprised when he struck something metal in less than an hour. It was a sphere of some kind and it had broken and shifted during its time in the ground. He was able to remove the lid and examine the contents inside. Many of the items were reduced to flimsy scraps of paper or dust, but there were red books in thick clear bags strewn throughout the sphere. When Kla’Tu had collected them all, he found himself holding a stack of 40 red books.

Slipping the first book out of the bag, he sat down and flipped through the pages. The book was written mostly in English, but there were many pictures and diagrams that he somehow faintly recognized. Perhaps his father or his father’s father had drawn diagrams like these. They had certainly drawn crosses and talked about a God from the old time that would return again someday. As he flipped through the notebooks, he recognized the words “God said.” They appeared many, many times. He knew these books were special and he very carefully packed them into his roll and started the long hike back to his village.