Dreams Come True

I remember as a child being fascinated with missionary stories, especially when they were stories from Africa. I would always skip through Christian magazines to the missionary section first scanning the page for exotic pictures and afterwards hanging on every word. In between the lines, I would be pretending that it was my life and name that was being written about. That life sounded so exciting, adventurous, and in some ways romantic.

I remember reading about people flying over jungles, crossing rivers, facing diseases, speaking funky languages, encountering random villages, eating weird food, living in extreme climates, and defeating daily odds which seemed so unimaginable from my upstate NY couch.

The other day I was flying over Congo. I saw the vast openness of this country, the rivers, and small isolated villages where you can't help but wonder how they survive without obvious access to medical treatment, a commercial center, or social community. It finally struck me that I am living that same life I was always fascinated by in the magazines. However my life didn't feel exciting, adventurous, and romantic like it did reading it on the page. My life like this is normal but the fact that it is normal was in itself exciting, adventurous, and romantic. It demonstrated a sense of comfort, completeness.

It is so easy for me to forget the journey that I have been on marked by quite amazing and significant steps and life decisions. Sometimes it takes flying in an airplane over the Congolese jungle to remind me that I am actually living my childhood dream. Childhood dreams I think are one of those things that we never really expect to actually happen and when they do we are a bit surprised. It was a good reminder that dreams really do and can come true.