Living Dreams

I leave for four days in Vegas today for my niece's wedding. Vegas and Easter seem incongruous, but if any city needs the message of Resurrection Sunday, it is probably Vegas. At any rate, I thought before I went I could squeeze in another interview with my WW2 veteran friend, Comer. At age 93 with a blood clot sitting in his hip slowly dissolving (we hope), I don't take any minute of my time left with him for granted.

I got juicy stories from him yesterday. Comer had been a strong, handsome, debonair man. He apparently drew lovely ladies to him like flies. He told me many stories that left my jaw sitting on my lap about him and "pretty girls." He also told clot-busting stories of courage and bravery in the air battles in WW2, of watching a friend dodge aircraft gunners 20,000 feet above him. I took notes so fast and furiously that by lunch time, when he had to leave, my arms could no longer move. I had ordered an interview recorder, but it won't be in for a few more days.

So I came home and finished packing, my "writer's elbows" aching. My niece will be getting married in a Vegas chapel by an Elvis impersonator. She loves Elvis and has always dreamt of a Vegas wedding. The guests were requested to dress in time warp attire. I had my pink poodle skirt, voluminous circle crinoline slip, and ruffled bobby socks. No one can accuse me of not entering their dreams wholeheartedly.

I thought of Comer as I packed, and of how excited he is to be a part of this book I am writing. He knew that the boys who fought in WW2 were a special group, and he had a great deal of pride in his role in that terrible time. He had even written some short stories about those times himself, which he promised he would find for me. He'd always dreamed someday someone would want to read them, but that dream had slowly trickled to a drop, the hopes of sharing the stories dried up and almost forgotten, and buried deep in a drawer.
"But I know I have them," he said, looking around the small apartment, "I'll find them."

We shouldn't let dreams die, I thought. I was glad my niece was being given an opportunity to live hers. And I was amazed at the kindness of God in letting me be a part of Comer living his. Asherel and I are studying the Civil Rights movement in our homeschool right now, and of course, have read the famous MLK speech: "I have a dream". His dream was noble and his means unimpeachable. We need dreams, I thought, dreams of what we could be, of desires fulfilled, and of the world a place where we finally know contentment, where the lion lies down with the lamb, where airplanes dodge rainbows not bombs, and where the city of sin becomes the city of committed love. I have a dream too, and it is of a day when all of us no longer walk with God by faith, but by sight. All of us.

2 Corinthians 5: 7, 17-20

For we live by faith, not by sight.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.









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