dreams.

Back in January I went to a weekend leadership retreat for young life. We spent the nice and cozy weekend at a house in Maupin, relishing in the beautiful views, good company, uplifting fellowship and times of reflection. One of the sessions was focused on our dreams, not the dreams that visit you in your sleep, rather the ones that you desire to accomplish. We were told that we had to write down at least twenty in the 9 minutes we were given, and both possible and impossible dreams should be featured. For the first few minutes I just sat there. Twenty dreams??! That seemed impossible. Yet as I allowed myself to think outside of my realistic box, I was able to jot down a few. The first one that came to mind and seemed to be something I could accomplish was this: write and publish a children's book.

I have always loved to write. I remember restarting up the school newspaper in middle school and being so excited to write stories. In high school, my journalism teacher sent in a few of my articles to contests and a couple of them won awards. My first job at OSU was as a writing assistant in the writing center. Writing papers at Multnomah was one of my favorite things; the longer the better!

After I graduated college, one of the jobs I had was at a preschool. I remember reading a book to the kids and thinking, "I can do WAY better than this! I should write children's books..." And I did. To date, I have written four. They are all sitting very nicely on my computer. I don't know where to go from here. Because I am a realist, I don't believe that anything will ever happen with it. But what if, for a moment, I make the choice to allow my dream to float out of my box and come true...Maybe I'll be forced to dream more often.