Last night I had the weirdest dream.
Usually, I don’t remember my dreams, but I woke up right in the middle of this one and so it stuck with me. I was back at the house that I lived in during my first two years of teaching.
I was in a service program then, so I lived with four other people. We had moved into this house mid-year of my first year of teaching. One of my roommates had found it for us and we had moved from a small townhouse to a house with enough space for us to spread out and breathe.
I had forgotten all about that house (it has been over 16 years after all) but there it was in all it’s red brick, laminate floors glory just as we had left it. I wandered from room to room in my dream. All the rooms were empty now, but even in my dreams I could remember how they looked when we lived there. My room was a mess by the way – a lifelong struggle that is getting better with age!
When I woke up from this dream, the first thought I had was – wow, I thought some things back then were SO important. Those first two years of teaching were challenging. Life-giving for sure, but also so full of ups and downs. If only I could have told my younger self “You haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait for some incredibly good and incredibly challenging and incredibly life changing things ahead!” Maybe I would have been easier on myself then. Maybe I would have lived that time more intentionally.
Do you think we will look back on 2020 in a decade or so and look at ourselves and our worries and say “You haven’t seen anything yet?” Let’s live in hope that we will find we have survived all this mess and live anew in a world that was worth fighting for.
So my prayer this morning is that we receive the grace to live today with intentionality. Let us recognize this time is just a blimp in a whole life of ups and downs and challenges and successes.
And may we be easy on ourselves as we go so we when we dream about this time somewhere down the line, we can smile and say “Look at what a lovely life we had.”
