My husband is a youth pastor. He's not your typical twenty-five year old cool, hip dude hangin' out with kids. No, he's a middle age father of a twenty five year old, and he loves teenagers. Every March, he (along with a large crew of volunteers) hosts a weekend retreat for the kids. This year the theme was "Dreams" - not the kind that come to you nocturnally, but the kind that stir in your heart and your thoughts; the kind that put longing in your soul for something more than what you've got or who are at present. In preparing for the retreat, he searched our personal archives for evidence of his own past dreams. In other words, he went through our storage room, digging through box after box. He didn't find everything he was looking for, but he did find a few things that he wasn't looking for - some of the first stories I ever wrote.
I've been a bibliophage for as long as I can remember. It was this love of reading that planted the dream-seed of writing in me. I loved (love) to lose myself in the worlds that lived between the covers of a book. I loved (love) to imagine the people and the places, to live in the moment, to be Nancy Drew, or Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Susan in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or a host of other characters. There were times when I couldn't put a book down for fear the story would continue without me.
And so I began to dream, and I began to write. I was twelve years old when I penned my first story on a very old manual typewriter. The story was an accounting of a family vacation to Florida during which a pleasant afternoon on a Miami beach found me flattened by a powerful ocean wave with my leg twisted around my brother's. Walking was painful for the rest of the trip and my dad carried me whenever I, who was highly embarrassed to be seen being held by her father, would let him. On our drive back to Missouri, the engine in our car blew, and we had to buy a new car in order to get home - a somewhat eventful vacation though it doesn't hold a candle to ones I've experienced as an adult.
After that first story, I wrote others here and there, but the story that my husband found in routing through our memories was the last one I wrote before becoming an adult and leaving my dream behind. It was my favorite of all the stories I'd written up to that point, and I treasured it as the last thread of my dream. I had titled the story, In The Land of Reconstruction. It was a fairy tale based on my life at the time.
A dream is a funny thing. It's not like the one who holds it. A dream is patient, in no hurry to be fulfilled. It may be quiet at times. You may have to, regrettably, set yours aside for awhile - it may lie dormant for years so that you even forget it ever existed; but then something happens. Life changes. You never know when. Some day you'll just be walking along when the avenue before you will turn a corner, open up, and give you a chance to pull that dream out of storage and make it come true.
I've been a bibliophage for as long as I can remember. It was this love of reading that planted the dream-seed of writing in me. I loved (love) to lose myself in the worlds that lived between the covers of a book. I loved (love) to imagine the people and the places, to live in the moment, to be Nancy Drew, or Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Susan in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or a host of other characters. There were times when I couldn't put a book down for fear the story would continue without me.
And so I began to dream, and I began to write. I was twelve years old when I penned my first story on a very old manual typewriter. The story was an accounting of a family vacation to Florida during which a pleasant afternoon on a Miami beach found me flattened by a powerful ocean wave with my leg twisted around my brother's. Walking was painful for the rest of the trip and my dad carried me whenever I, who was highly embarrassed to be seen being held by her father, would let him. On our drive back to Missouri, the engine in our car blew, and we had to buy a new car in order to get home - a somewhat eventful vacation though it doesn't hold a candle to ones I've experienced as an adult.
After that first story, I wrote others here and there, but the story that my husband found in routing through our memories was the last one I wrote before becoming an adult and leaving my dream behind. It was my favorite of all the stories I'd written up to that point, and I treasured it as the last thread of my dream. I had titled the story, In The Land of Reconstruction. It was a fairy tale based on my life at the time.
A dream is a funny thing. It's not like the one who holds it. A dream is patient, in no hurry to be fulfilled. It may be quiet at times. You may have to, regrettably, set yours aside for awhile - it may lie dormant for years so that you even forget it ever existed; but then something happens. Life changes. You never know when. Some day you'll just be walking along when the avenue before you will turn a corner, open up, and give you a chance to pull that dream out of storage and make it come true.
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