Alaska Outside My Window

...or at least, it looks like Alaska right now.

We are having an old-fashioned blizzard--swirling snow everywhere and howling winds against my dream room windows and that blue-grey tinge to the whole world out there. I was going shopping today, but instead, I'll be fortunate to change out of my robe and nightgown. When you live in snow country you have to be willing to change your plans. It helps if you listen to that still, small voice when it tells you to drive around and--

do your errands on a clear blue day
make hay while the sun shines
think and plan ahead.

I've already had my cinnamon and sugar toast and my pretend coffee while listening to Christmas carols and reading the best Christmas book ever made, the Good Old Days' Big Christmas Book (and here,too). Five-hundred-ninety-six pages of peoples' memories and photos of their favorite childhood Christmasses from the early 1900's. I'm not even a big fan of what the world calls Christmas, but I love this book. If yours is an old-fashioned soul, you might also love it.

Tom is home sleeping downstairs--he went in to work last night at midnight and came driving through all the blowing snow an hour ago. So he is safe and I am safe and our cats are safe upon my dream room bed. I pray that Naomi is safe in her little home across town, too.

I watched my much-loved Christmas movie, Prancer, this week and was surprised! Last year I wanted my own little cozy room upstairs like Jessica's, complete with a record player, slanted walls and snow blowing outside the window. Last year I had no room like that, but I've one now.

And then I watched another Christmas movie, Hook, and remembered that, for more than ten years, I'd also wanted an upstairs' room like the childrens' English nursery, and this time, I even noticed their room was pink--guess which color I painted mine? A sub-conscious choice perhaps?

And Home Alone! When it first came out, we lived in a double-wide mobile home in the bleak Nevada Desert and I so wanted, instead, a lovely three-story house with a basement, even, all dressed in traditional decor like the McAllisters'. When the movie later came out on video we bought it and I watched it sometimes solely to memorize that house--to feel as though I was there--really, there, myself. Well, three years later I found myself living in a two-story house (with an unfinished attic on the second floor) and even with a basement below. A mini-mini-version of the McAllister house, but grand enough for me. And here I still am and when I re-watch Home Alone now, the decor of that house, though pretty traditional, appears a bit too 1980's for my taste. And amazingly, I prefer my own home to theirs.

What is the point of my rambling? 

Dreams take time to come about. But they do still happen, just maybe not exactly as we'd pictured them. And they can be more remarkable than we'd imagined if we give them time and room and hope and lots of never giving-up. 

And often dreams break out of our imagination and into reality when on the oh-hum, regular, ordinary days, we place them in God's hands and let Him do whatever He wants to them. Even if it means, at first, we don't understand the ways He is tweaking them as we watch Him with questioning eyes and hands just itching to create something much more logical.

But God is big on trust. And He's worthy of any trust we may give Him when it comes to dreams. For He knows us better than we know ourselves and He knows what ten and twenty years from now--after changing and changing-we will love best.

No--really.


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