Recognizing Your Dreams Coming True

Recognizing Your Dreams Coming True

“Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.” Acts 5:4 KJV

When I was younger my parents always seemed to look for things for us three kids to do. Like most parents, my parents were very interested in their children. I remember my father starting me on collecting stamps and how, through the years, by mom has continued the tradition by getting me the stamps that the Postal Service issued throughout the year as a Christmas gift.

Another great thing my parents did, and I have so many fond memories of, is they used to take us on great trips and vacations. I remember, during one period of time, we would go to a church in a different town, and we would attend a service if we were there on a Sunday. See, we were working on a perfect Sunday School attendance streak, and to “prove” we went to church somewhere else, we had to bring back a church bulletin from the church we attended.

One of the problems my parents faced, when we went on long trips, was trying to keep us kids from getting bored. One of my favorite car games was to see who could find the most different state tags. There were only two rules to this game: only the first person to see a state tag on that car could count it and you couldn’t count a state tag if you were in that state.

I was ever the eagle eye. One of my tricks was to be ever vigilant when we got close to a state line. I wanted to be the first to spot a tag of an upcoming state before we entered it. Even then I had a competitive streak.

Still, there were times when we were expected to be quiet. As you grow older you begin to understand a parent’s need for those sanity breaks. During my early adventures I don’t know if the parents “needing a break” thought ever entered my mind though. I was probably still in one of those “the world revolves around me” periods of my life.

During those “quiet times,” I would often gaze out the window and check out the scenery. I would notice the cows bowing their heads to eat that never-ending grass that laid in front of them. Then there were the farmers plowing their fields mastering those straight lines I often had trouble drawing in school. If I was really bored, I might wonder what the cows were thinking or what it must be like to be a farmer.

Sometimes we would cross a bridge and I would look out to see the river life. If a saw a beach I might wonder what fun games the kids were playing. Seeing a boat or ship might leave me guessing as to where it was going.

During other quiet times, I would daydream about what it might be like to be transported into one of the places we drove past. Could I back that semi into that store better than that truck driver? “I bet I’m faster than that person running around that track,” I would dream.

Then sometimes I would imagine myself living in some of the places we passed. I’m sure, on my visits to DC, I thought about what it must have been like to live in the White House. When we visited Philadelphia, I’m sure I wondered what it must have been like to meet Ben Franklin or be one of his friends.

One of the places I definitely remember passing, when we went through Virginia, was a small, gated community. It was beautifully landscaped out front and with its guard shack at the entrance, I was sure it took a very special person to live there.

Even at this early age, I was extremely interested in the presidents. I could tell you which was the first one to do this and which was the first one to do that. Do you want to know where one of them was born? No problem, I was your kid. I was the presidential whiz kid.

So, when we passed this development, it’s no wonder it would catch my eyes every time. Having its presidential name carved across the entrance would have really excited me. I’m sure I didn’t believe its streets were paved with gold. No, I thought, it was even better. “I bet there is a president statue on every corner. Somewhere in there, there must be some great hall that honors the presidents,” thoughts would fill my mind.

When you become President of the United States your whole world changes. Once you become president all of us presidential history nuts start investigating your life’s story. We want to visit where you are born, raised, and if you are no longer alive, we want to visit your grave. Another thing we want to do is to read about you and learn how you became you and how that propelled you into the highest office in the land.

I’m almost positive that most, if not all, the presidents’ egos like people to know that information. They probably also wanted it known that their lives made a difference and there are actually people out there that want to know so much about them. Their hope might also be that people will visit their birthplaces, their homes, and their graves.

One of the things I notice when I read about a president is that most of their biographies and autobiographies start out explaining their family’s history. Most are proud of their family history. They will tell stories, proudly, of how their great-great-great grandfather did this or that. Often, they will tell how one generation moved from here to there, and eventually wound up where they were born.

This President was no different. The opening chapter of one of his memoirs tells several stories of the trials his family went through. Because of some of these trials, his family was led to the place of his birth. In an interesting twist, he explains, although he is not sure why, how his hometown got its name.

It seems his hometown probably picked its name from the Bible. The town was originally called “Plains of Dura,” which comes from Daniel 3:1. Here King Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, makes a large golden image (60 cubits high by 6 cubits wide). He places that image in Dura, a province of Babylon, and he expects all his citizens to worship it.

You may better remember the story as the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were young Hebrews who refused to bow, or worship, his self-made idol. Promptly, Nebuchadnezzar orders them to be thrown into the fiery furnace. To make a point of his anger, he orders his servants to turn the heat up seven times hotter than normal.

Well, God saves the three of them and Nebuchadnezzar is amazed. Not a hair on their head is singed. Nebuchadnezzar reverses course and issues a decree that if anyone speaks badly about Shadrach’s, Meshach’s, or Abednego’s God they shall be cut to pieces.

The presidential author almost seems at a loss for words as he tries to understand how a town could name itself for a place that housed a golden image. So that part of his story only gets talked about in just one paragraph.

John Malone once said, “Productive land is one of the very few permanent values throughout history.” The Cable Cowboy, as John is called, is the largest landowner in the United States. Malone owns land in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, and Maryland. There are 2.2 million acres of land in his portfolio.

In order to get to the top of the list, the Cable Cowboy had to pass the likes of six families or heirs of families: the Pingree Heirs (830,000 acres, 10th largest US landholders), the King Ranch Heirs (911,215 acres, 9th largest US landholders), the Singleton Family (1.1 million acres, 7th largest US landholder), the Irving Family (1.246 million acres, 6th largest US landholder), the Reed Family (1.37 million acres, 5th largest US landholder), and the Emmerson Family (1.95 million acres, 3rd largest US landholder).

Then Malone also had to pass Brad Kelley (1 million acres, 8th largest US landholder) and Stan Kroenke (1.38 million acres, 4th largest US landholder). But the crowning moment came in February 2011 when he passed Ted Turner (2 million acres, now 2nd largest US landholder).
To give you an idea of how much land that is, the Cable Cowboy owns more acres than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware. In fact, if you add those two states total acreage together, Malone owns just a little bit less than their total acreage combined. Now that’s a lot of land.

It is estimated that there are 3.9 billion acres of land in the world. So, 2.2 million acres is still just a drop in the bucket compared to the total land acreage in the world. Those 2.2 million acres would be about 0.056% of the land acreage in the world.

Now if you want to talk about the United States, the US land mass is about 640 million acres (or 16.4% of land acreage in the world). In other words, John Malone owns about 0.34% or 1/3 of one percent of the land acreage in the United States.

No matter how you look at it, 2.2 million acres of land is a lot of land to the individual eye. But to God that is just a small drop in the bucket. When you go back and look in Genesis, to God’s creation of all this land, you really have to come away impressed. Land is just a small part of the creating He did.

Since I wasn’t around when God flooded the earth during Noah’s time, I’m not really sure if there was more or less land before or after the flooding, but either way, there still had to be a lot of land on each side of that flooding.

Now God gave man the task of managing that land. Over the years, many have claimed land as their own. The problem with that is: God gave it to man, man claimed it as his own, but when the one “owning the land” dies, from a legal standpoint anyway, that “owner” no longer owns it. The ownership transfers to someone or somewhere else.

In other words, when John Malone dies, he will no longer be the largest landowner in the United States. I’m not sure what will happen to his estate, but there is even a chance, depending on how they divide up the estate, that no one in his family will even be in the top ten United States landowners.

The other day I was standing out looking at our lake. I stepped into one of my daydreaming roles. At this place in my life, I have started looking back to see if my life has served any purpose or if I have reached any of the goals I have set during my lifetime.

I guess moments like these are natural when you get older, but for some reason I started reflecting on what I haven’t done more than what I had done. Being recently retired I started wondering how I was ever going to achieve all the goals that I obviously haven’t come close to reaching yet.

About that time a cool breeze crossed my face. I turned my head, and I noticed all the birds frantically flying around from tree to tree. The squirrels would suddenly halt their movement as if when they stopped nothing would be able to see them. The leaves also enjoyed the breeze. I could tell by the way they were dancing.

Then the strangest thought rushed into my mind. As I stood there looking from the banks of my lot in Presidential Lakes, I realized my little boy dream of living in this community was a reality. I pass the carved Presidential Lakes sign, which I admired as a little boy, as I leave or enter the development just about every day.

It’s the same development I dreamed of living in when I was a little boy when my parents would pass it as we traveled to far off lands. Although there are no presidential statues nor halls honoring the presidents, it is a very nice community indeed. No, there aren’t any golden streets either.

When I was in sales, and when I had a great sales month, I would often get irritated at the start of the next month. Almost without exception, there were no thanks for all the efforts you put in the previous month. The first day of the next month always felt like: “What have you done for me lately?”

It’s easy for me to sit here and criticize those lacks of celebrations, but in my personal life I do the exact same thing. Rarely do I take the time to celebrate, or even appreciate, an accomplishment. Sometimes I even forget the goal when I reach it.

A prime example of forgetfulness is forgetting that, when I was a little boy, this is the exact place I dreamed of one day living in. Often, I’m more worried about what I can do in the yard or in the house than I am thankful for what I’ve got.

When I was working, I always seemed to be more worried about paying off the house, having enough money to do the improvements I wanted, and making sure all the bills were paid so someone wouldn’t come and take my house away.

Nothing is inherently wrong with any of those goals. Goals motivate us. Hard work enables us to reach a standard-of-living that lets us have a comfortable, happy life. Where I mess up is when my entire focus is on the goal.

When you only focus on the goal, you miss a lot of this thing we call life. It’s easy to work so hard to help your kids have things, or help them have a better life, but if you work so hard to make things better for them you are more likely to miss spending time with them as they grow up. Before you know it, they are grown and starting their own adult lives. You’re left holding an empty bag in which your goals have fallen through.

It’s easy to set a goal and receive the prize. That prize can be a sweet victory. You think, “That car, that house, that TV, etc., are all nice, but there are even nicer ones out there.” The problem is, there are always nicer ones out there and you will never reach that point of total satisfaction. When you can’t be happy with what you have, having what you don’t won’t satisfied that thirst for long either.

That long sought after promotion gives you a better salary, more prestige, and a sense of accomplishment, but with such a promotion also comes more expectations. You should be proud of yourself, and you should celebrate that accomplishment. But don’t let it consume you. Life isn’t just rising higher, it is also about enjoying things, even if the demands of a new position don’t seem to allow you those opportunities.

Take time to appreciate reaching your goals and don’t have so many goals that you never have time to celebrate the victories of reaching them. Most of all, don’t forget to thank the One who made reaching those goals possible. God got you here, don’t forget Him.

In this former president’s book “An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” this President proudly boasts of his family’s history and the rural life he spent his childhood in. He describes a southern world where racial integration had fully taken hold. Memories and stories of how the Northern forces, during the Civil War, had forced “equality” on them still cause a little bit of resentment among many of the locals.

Still, the former President states, there seemed to be a mutual, if not distant, respect among the different cultures. He even seems to go out of his way to impress upon the reader how many of the black men that worked for his dad, or crossed paths with him in during his childhood, had a profound impact on his life. He even says, “No one would want to return to the old days of unchallenged racial segregation, when blacks ‘knew their place (page 269).’”

Most of the book is about his rural boyhood though. He talks about raising animals, planting and harvesting crops, and tenant farmers. If you want to learn how to slaughter a pig, he has some pretty good details about that. There is enough in there to dissuade me from being a farmer, especially if I decided to do it in the age before power equipment.

The greatest theme the former President seems to be trying to get across is that those tough times made him into the man he became. He rallies around the theme that success was only natural if your character allows you to learn the lessons this early life taught him. Themes like morals, respect, hard work, humbleness, and being thankful for what you had carry a great deal of weight with him.

In a combination of thankfulness and respect, he says, “Nothing went to waste around our house, and we were expected to eat whatever was prepared and to clean our plates before leaving the table (page 34).” In an age where everything now seems to be disposable, those stern rules would now seem mean. To him it was a way of life, and it has made him the man he is today.

Jimmy Carter states that a huge turning point in his family’s farming life came not only when power machines replaced a lot of the horses and manual labor, but when his father switched from the main crop being cotton to it becoming peanuts. One thing is for sure, the peanut became an iconic symbol for him when he ran for president.

In the final chapter of the book, Jimmy Carter talks mainly about his mom, Lilian, his sisters, Ruth and Gloria, and his brother Billy. He is the last surviving member of that group. Both his sisters, his brother, and his dad died of pancreatic cancer.

All his children and grandchildren live far away from his Plains, Georgia farm. They have all established lives that don’t include farming. Sadly, Jimmy Carter believes he will be the last in his line of family members to know the farming life.

Jimmy Carter closes out the book with the following statement (page 271):

Time change, and deeds to the various fields will be held in the future by one family and then another. They may or may not be my descendants, but I am confident that the earth itself will remain basically the same, continuing to shape the lives of its owners, for good or ill, as it has for millennia. After all, the land belonged to the Indians before it was ours.

Acts 4 tells how the newfound Christian community came together for the common good. They were so into this common good that Acts 4:32 (KJV) states: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” Basically, they so much believed in this common good that private ownership of possessions didn’t seem a logical choice.

The Bible also tells a story of a couple of landowners. Their names were Ananias and Sapphira. They were husband and wife. Their story is in Acts 5. I’m not sure of the time difference between chapters four (where the verse in the previous paragraph is from) and chapter five (the story of Ananias and Sapphira), nor am I completely sure those stories are even connected. But it does seem strange that their stories comes right after one another.

Ananias, with his wife’s consent, sells a piece of their property. That seems to hint that it wasn’t all of the property they owned. Still, as a goodwill gesture they decide to donate the proceeds to Peter’s or the Christian cause. The Bible doesn’t say one way or another that Ananias, or his wife, ever said they were going to give the entire donation to the Christian church.

The Bible does say that Peter confronts Ananias and ask him why Satan has been allowed to overrule the Holy Spirit in his heart. Did Peter know Ananias’ real estate agent, or did God tell Peter the selling price? Again, the Bible doesn’t really say.

But for some reason Peter knew that Ananias hadn’t given the entire proceeds to the Christian church. Peter also seemed to be correct in judging Ananias’ heart. Ananias never even gets the chance to defend himself, for when he heard Peter’s accusation, he fell over dead.

Now everyone that heard and saw this was shocked. I don’t believe they were so much shocked by Ananias’ death as they were shocked by how serious a matter this must be to God. One moment Ananias is offering some proceeds from a land sale and the next moment he is on the ground dead.

Well, three hours later Sapphira comes walking in. She has no clue her husband has just died just a short time before. Peter doesn’t beat around the bush. He starts by asking Sapphira if her husband Ananias and she sold the plot of land for the price that he had heard it was sold for. Maybe sensing lying wasn’t going to get her anywhere, she confirms Peter has the correct total.

Guess what? She drops over dead, too. What happened?

Trying to tie all the pieces together, I believe the story is all about appreciating all that you have, and realizing it was all God’s to start with and to end with. Their problem came about because they thought the land was theirs alone.

So often we are involved in the here or now to the point we overlook all the blessings God has given us. What we have never seems to be enough or good enough. Celebrations of victory get postponed by reaching arms that never seem long enough.

Think about a boyhood dream subdivision you hoped to live in, or the land you owned and which your family has owned for generations, or even selling off some land or property to give to God’s cause, or any other goal or dream you may have had. Take time to celebrate those victories because they all are eventually going to be taken from you anyway. They are only on loan to you while you are alive.

Excuse me now, I have a lake and neighborhood I need to go appreciate.

Prayer: Dear Mighty Father, Thank you so much for boyhood memories. Thank you even more for boyhood dreams that have come true. You are the God who dumps blessings in my lap. Please help me to send more time appreciating those blessings and less time wanting more. Amen.