Robert Fulghum tells about meeting a young American traveler in the airport in Hong Kong. She was tensely occupying a chair next to his. Her backpack bore the scars and dirt of some hard traveling. It bulged with mysterious souvenirs of seeing the world.
When the tears began to drip from her chin, he imagined some lost love or the sorrow of giving up adventure for college classes. But then she began to sob--a veritable flood of tears.
She was not quite ready to go home, she said. She had run out of money. She had spent 2 days waiting in the airport standby with little to eat and too much pride to beg. Her plane was about to go and she had lost her ticket. "She had been sitting in this one spot for 3 hours, sinking into the cold sea of despair like some torpedoed freighter."
Fulghum and a nice older couple from Chicago, dried her tears. They offered to take her to lunch and to talk to the powers that be at the airlines about some remedy. She stood up to go with them, turned around to pick up her belongings. And SCREAMED. They thought something terrible had happened to her but no...it was her ticket. She found her ticket. She had been sitting on it for 3 hours.
"Like a sinner saved from the very jaws of hell," writes Fulghum, "she laughed and cried and hugged us all and was suddenly gone. Off to catch a plane for home and what next. Leaving most of the passenger lounge deliriously limp from being part of her drama." She had been sitting on her ticket the whole time.
The story is told of a farmer and his wife in the dusty panhandle of Texas. They had eked out a meager living for 30 years. One day an impeccably dressed man driving a fancy car came to their door. He told the farmer that he had good reason to believe there was a reservoir of oil underneath his property. If the farmer would allow the gentleman the right to drill, perhaps the farmer would become a wealthy man. The farmer stated emphatically he didn't want anyone messing up his property and asked the gentleman to leave.
The next year about the same time the gentleman returned with his nice clothes and another fancy car. The oilman pleaded with the farmer, and again the farmer said no. This same experience went on for the next 8 years. During those 8 years the farmer and his wife struggled to make ends meet. Nine years after the first visit from the oilman, the farmer came down with a disease that put him in the hospital. When the gentleman arrived to plead his case for oil, he spoke to the farmer's wife. Reluctantly, she gave permission to drill.
Within a week huge oil rigs were beginning the process of drilling for oil. The first day nothing happened. The 2nd day brought only disappointment and dust. But on the 3rd day, right about noon, black bubbly liquid began to squirt up in the air. The oilman had found "black gold," and the farmer and his wife were instantly millionaires. They had been sitting on a reservoir of wealth while they struggled to make a living.
A century and a half ago there was a poor man out of work living in Hingham, Massachusetts. He lounged around the house until one day his wife told him to get out and work. He sat down on the shore of the bay, and whittled a soaked shingle into a wooden chain. His children that evening quarreled over it. He whittled a 2nd one to keep peace. While he was whittling the 2nd one a neighbor came in and said, "Why don't you whittle toys and sell them? You could make money at that."
"Oh," he said, "I would not know what to make."
"Why don't you ask your own children what to make?" He acted upon the hint, and the next morning when Mary came down the stairway, he asked, "What do you want for a toy?"
She began to tell him she would like a doll's bed, a doll's washstand, a doll's carriage, and she went on with a list of things that would take him a lifetime to supply. So, consulting his own children, he took the firewood, for he had no money to buy lumber, and whittled. Soon those strong, unpainted Hingham toys became known all over the world. I guess we could say this man had been sitting on his hands, for his hands were where his fortune lay.
What is it you are sitting on? In this grand world of opportunity, do you have possibilities and potentials which are lying unused?
Let's begin here.
GOD'S WILL FOR HIS CHILDREN IS TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
Do you believe it is God's will for His children to live cold, bitter lives of defeat? None of us believe that. If that were true, why would Jeremiah have written, "Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord...."? Blessed means happy. It means contented, at peace with yourself. That is God's will for your life and mine. If we are not at peace with ourselves right now, it may be because we are sitting on some gift, some opportunity, some potential blessing to ourself and to the world.
Admittedly, each of us would have our own definition of success. Some would say, if I raise my children to be responsible citizens, I will be a success. Others say, if I can write a piece of music, paint a picture, write a book, I will be a success. Others say, if I can just hold on till retirement, that's all the success I'll need. Each of us has our own dreams, our own definition of success.
Unfortunately, statistics show that only 10% of us actually "succeed" at what we set out to accomplish. Another 10% accept defeat and turn to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide to deal with our despair. The other 80% simply "endure." It is not God's will that we should endure "lives of quiet desperation" as the poet expressed it. God's will is for life abundant. God's will is that we have dreams and that we achieve those dreams.
This is not to say that sometimes our dreams do not have to be adjusted. They do. Ex-president Jimmy Carter dared to dream he could become president of the United States. He achieved that dream, but world events turned against him. Carter had to repair his dreams, and he did. He dedicated his time to helping the poor thru Habitat for Humanity, building low-cost housing. He and Rosalyn teach Sunday School, and they have written 6 books since 1981.
Rosalyn wrote, "If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old...There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it."
This brings us to the 2nd thing to be said,
GOD HAS PROVIDED US MEANS BY WHICH OUR DREAMS CAN BE ACHIEVED.
Let me tell you about a couple who do not have many of the opportunities that many of us have. Intellectually they would probably be considered borderline retarded. Both are from less fortunate families financially. All they had in the world when they married was their love for each other and their faith in God.
What kind of opportunities were available to such a couple? Would they become wards of the state?
Not on your life. They heard about a church that was looking for a part-time janitor. The church paid $100.00 per week. They discovered that working hard and working together, they could do all the church required in one day. The pastor was most pleased with their work. They were dependable and had a great attitude. He was happy to write them a letter of recommendation.
Soon they had 4 other small churches that they also cleaned one day a week. They now had an annual income of over $20,000, which at the time was quite a respectable sum of money. They were essentially their own bosses, they enjoyed one another's company and they took pride in doing their work to the best of their ability. They took the skills they had and applied them to the opportunities at hand.
God has so constructed His world that there is a niche for everyone of us. That is why each of us has our own respective talents and abilities. But many of us are sitting on our opportunities.
And this brings us to the last thing to be said.
THE SECRET IS TRUST IN GOD.
The crucial ingredient in achieving our dreams is confidence. Some people keep their dreams bottled up inside. They would make a difference. They would right wrongs, create beauty, make the world a better place to live. But something holds them back. That something is fear.
As Erma Bombeck once wrote in one of her columns, "It takes a lot of courage to show your dream to someone else. They might laugh. They might not understand. Worse, they might take it out of the box and drop it and where would you get another one? Dreams are fragile, you know. Some people in desperation give up on dreams...
"I understand the fears and apprehensions of the closet dreamers, but, oh, how I admire the Mother Teresas...the Samantha Smiths, the Christa McAuliffes, the Helen Kellers and, yes, the Sarahs who write poetry on the kitchen table at night.
"Are they winners? Winning is not what they're all about...What is special about them is they're dreamers who put it on the line. They had the courage to admit that what they wanted was just beyond their reach, but if they wanted it badly enough...anything was possible.
"They gambled. And for the risk, they were all rewarded with a legacy for others to follow...."
Where do you get the courage to reach for your dreams? For many of us, it comes from our faith in God. We believe that it is God's will that we live successful lives, however we might define success. We believe He has given us everything we need to achieve our dreams. All we have to do is trust Him and venture out boldly to live the kind of lives He has called us to live. No more sitting on our tickets. No more sitting on our fortunes. No more sitting on our hands.
We are "like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." That can be a description of each of us. Following our dreams. Trusting in God to supply our needs. No longer bottling up our hopes and ambitions, but achieving all God has given us the opportunity to achieve.
