Friday Five: For Just 24 hrs.

My colleague hrod from Revgals has been under the weather. She posted the following 24 hr. set of questions. She has obviously recovered some, but I do wish her continued relief.
“Yesterday I had the 24 hour flu. I had been told by the people who had it first that it really was a twenty-four hour bug. And so while I dealt with all the blech of the flu, I kept reminding myself that morning would come and I would feel a lot better.

This is certainly a strange way to start out a Friday Five but it made me think about what I might like to do if I knew it would only last for 24 hours. There are no reality boundaries to these imaginings. So here are the five things for you to consider...
1. If you could dramatically change your physical appearance for 24 hours, what would you do?
There are a couple of things I would like to do. One, I would love to spike my hair. But then I could never show up at church and since I like showing up at church, I couldn’t do that. The other would be to drop 70 lbs. for the day as an incentive to lose some more weight. But then I wouldn’t have anything I could wear and I would have to stay home because I couldn’t go anywhere naked. Hmmmm. I think I need 24 hrs. to think this one out!!
2. If you could live in another place for 24 hours where would you go?
I would like to spend 24 hrs. in one of the artic regions—Antarctica or the North polar cap. I would like to see the stark beauty of the Polar Regions, but I wouldn’t want to spend more than a day. Everywhere else I would want to spend more than 24 hrs. Perhaps I would like to spend 24 hrs. just in the Garden of Gethsemane if it was a quiet 24 hrs.
3. You get to do somebody else's job for a day... I would like to be Presiding Bishop of TEC for just one day. Of course, the Church would never recover! But I would like to see the inner workings of the PB’s job and meet some of the shakers and movers of the Church at that level. Part of me would like to be Archbishop of Canterbury for the day, but the thought of dealing with all the arcane stuff of the Church of England would make me bilious. But then again I would love to be the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony for the day or perhaps the Atlanta Symphony. I thought about the Vienna, but Ich kann nicht Deutch sprecht. I would love to direct the orchestra to play the Mahler First Symphony.
4.Spend the day with another person from anywhere in time and space...
Of course I would love to spend some time with Jesus on one of his times when he was alone. I would love to ask what he intended for the Church to be. I don’t think we have gotten it right. Another person is Dag Hammersjkold. He was a man that I respected in my youth. I would love to have met St. Augustine before he developed the doctrine of Original Sin. It might be interesting to think of what kind of people we would be, or what kind of Church we would be if we had not been worried that we were going to hell all of the time. I would have liked to have been with the writer of Leviticus 18:22 and talked him out of it. It might have spared millions of people over the ages.
5. A magical power is yours. Which one would you pick?”
I am not really crazy about miracle powers because it is one of those “playing God” things that always gets me into trouble. But I would like to be able to settle peace on the people of the Middle East for 24 hours. The question is: would 24 hrs of Salaam/Shalom be enough to make the people there thirst after peace instead of vengeance? I think the other magical power I would love to have is a way to zap all the politicians in Washington, DC so that they might have the people of the world in mind rather than their own self-interests.
I feel something like a Miss Universe candidate replying that she wants world peace. But isn’t that what we all want?