Dreams ...

The whole concept of dreams has always left me in awe. When I read of how many times God would speak to people through dreams, I cannot escape wondering if that is still not the case today for us at times.  It is just after 0400 on a Sunday morning and so very bright outside with the full moon.  I awoke from a most interesting dream that has so affected me but not in a bad way.

In this mental movie, I am in a cramped airplane seat next to the window and the ride is very bumpy with lights dimming and then back to bright with this sense of doom on the filled flight.  However, my mind is not at all caught up in that worry for there is this man and his wife, older than I, sitting near me.  She is wearing a bright red dress and both are smiling longingly at each other. It is, well, sweet and poignant in the midst of the impending doom the others while I and the couple are allowed on this island of joy for a few fleeting moments.  I did not know them but knew they were the parents of a student I had had recently or perhaps the parents of a dear friend killed in Vietnam that I have often wondered how life has gone for them since their son, my best friend, was taken from us all at eighteen years old.

Cramped in my seat and clutched in my hands due to the shaking aircraft, I am taking plastic collar stays out of a small hard plastic container they usually are sold in.  These strips are white but with statements or sayings laser printed on them.  One of sayings I am looking at reads, "the best two things that ever happened to me was you (the wife) and my Chevrolet.  I look up and see the man and realize he is dead yet sort of like a mist with the brightest smile.  I am taken with the warmth and sincerity of his smile for he is speaking to his wife through his words on the plastic strips and through me as the reader of these strips to his wife. 

I can tell they are so in love and she is so sad, now, but with this glowing smile as the departed husband has returned to tell her special little things he had failed to express while he was alive and together.  Their smile at each other was breathtaking, so warm and so intent for I knew that was the only remnant of a long time together; the smile! Then I realized I was crying one of those very hard, deep cries yet constrained to be the best I could be for this couple as the plane apparently angles toward destruction in this storm.  There are dozens of the white strips in the plastic case. My tears woke me!

Now Freud would probably have a field day with that scenario and that dream could well be ash heaped like the thousands of dreams I have had in my life.  I dream a great deal and always have but this one was, well, unique in some many ways. The fact I remember so vividly is what is most significant.  Just now as I write this, a train is passing close by, fitting I guess, and the lonesome sound of the quieted whistle seems appropriate to my mood right now.

Why the plane, the plastic strips, the detachment from the rest of the passengers were feeling in their panic while I and these two people I did not even really know were somehow extracted from that chaos to have a few shared last moments with each other via me reading sayings from the departed husband to his long time bride?  Guess that will be unanswerable but what is has done is pushed me into the mental nature and assessment of my own life that departed man was feeling as his time with his bride was apparently fleeting. 

I saw only warmth, joy, love and fulfillment with two people in the midst of a crashing world. Wow! And I was allowed to be part of it, Double Wow!  And the tears that were flowing were tears of joy that they were given those last few moments together for him to share, through me in those strips, words he wanted to have expressed to her during their life together.

The application ... I have no clue professionally what it might mean and perhaps nothing is one answer.  Yet as my wife and I race toward forty-one years together and we are both busy with our lives, our work, our church, our family, the dream has alerted me that none of that qualifies as a valid excuse for hours and days of busied silence between two people God joined four decades ago.   There are, I realize sitting here this morning, a million things (strips) of dialog that have grown dusty or rusty from non-use or buried in the recesses of the, I Should Have Told Her This bin before it is too late.  I sit here realizing that to most people in my world, I am pretty open about my thoughts and opinions and ideas but within my own family and with my wife I am not as open and free flowing in my expressions (the strips) so the question, what are you doing with your strips or are you writing them onto a piece of plastic, storing them for "one day" before that plane does crash and somebody like me in the dream is taking out each strip to read to Alicia for me?

This weekend, and it is only early  Sunday morning,  I have learned of a divorce of two dear friends my wife and I went through our early lives together with in junior high and high school.  This week we have learned of a young man that has come forth to openly explain a life of sexual abuse by a "friend" that has scarred him for life.  This week I have found myself dealing with a problem student in striving to give this young man one possibly last chance to learn to work with others and to enhance his own self image all of this in an environment of anger and frustration with those around him. I had to try once more before his "plane" crashed. This morning at church will be three students of mine attend from discussions God has provided that has opened up a gateway to the importance of having good people around you in a spiritual environment; I could not be more happy about this this morning in a few hours. I got to spend a full day with two of my grandchildren Friday going to a really stupid movie, eating way too much popcorn but loving every moment with these nine year old and six year old precious gifts God has presented me. So my life is rich and so taken for granted I realized with my dream.

So you are probably thinking I have finally lost my mind or he is just tired or whatever your diagnosis of the dream, the fact is that I have been convicted by the strips of how much I do not say to the person I have been with since we were twelve years old.  Never did I deserve her, never was I good enough for her, so many times I have taken her for granted, disappointed her and not been as transparent with my life with her as I should have been been.   I have far too many "strips" in my plastic case that need to be said earnestly and tenderly before we are that airborne husband, now departed I realize, and his bride swelled with love and glowing with the words he always wanted to tell her but could now through me as I read the strips.

So I guess my blog today qualifies as a love letter to my Bride.  So her Groom via this message to my friends is a commitment or a recommitment to throw the strips away and just say to her what I want to say and realize she longs to hear from me as she is blissfully sleeping now that it is almost 0500.  So many people in my life and I realize each of them has brush stroked their unique color on my painting, my life.  Combat veterans scarred physically and emotionally, abused men and women by spouses and boy friends / girl friends,  students from dysfunctional families that feel nobody cares for or about them that flow into my life and roll around like sand in the ocean of my life. With each of those grains of sand I realize I give more time and energy to others in seeking to help, to ease, to lift than I do the woman of my youth! 

I need to end this but what is the essence of my thoughts still so vivid this morning from that dream?  I suppose the real nugget is to assess what is really important in your life through the lens of those placed around you that truly love you and care for you and want the very best for you. And then  go about finding ways to express your love, your appreciation in colors or hues of realness and not assumptions or smoke signals.  Commit when you read this to finding three people in your life that mean more to your life, that real you, than any other and in words, not strips, why they qualify as one of those three, please! 

Change begins with that first step so make that first step in your own aircraft banging through life on a crash trajectory worthy of the people most impacting on your life.  Today that will be my wife, my daughter and my son.  Tomorrow will be three more and then the next tomorrow.  In other words, throw the strips away and use the words with the person before your plane takes its death rattle.