Impractical Dreams

 What do you do with the things in life that you would want to do, but if you did them, you’d be destroying your life?  Not because they were immoral, but because you would have to devote your life’s resources to things that are very low on the list of priorities. 

On a recent family road trip to Idaho, I made the comment that it would be fun to own a small, fast airplane that could get us there almost as time efficiently as an airline (I have a pilots license but haven’t used it for years).  If you take out getting to the airport early for security, baggage and boarding, the small plane is on par with a commercial flight for the distance we were going.  Just for fun I asked my wife to look up really fast, four seat airplanes to see what price they are going for.  The four to six seat planes I inquired about start at $300,000 and could get us places at over 300 miles per hour.  

 

We looked at financially out of reach planes and dreamed….and then came back down to earth.  All though I’m not sure I’ve landed yet.  I’ve continued thinking about how much fun it would be to have a plane to go adventuring with.  Being more realistic I’ve set my sites on something like a Cherokee 6 as a practical fit.  It’s a six seat plane and hauls plenty of stuff (often called the pick up truck of the sky) and can cruise at 170 mph.  The price for a plane like this is more modest, ranging from $50K to $150K depending on what model year and how much avionics updating has been done. 

 

This plane has a lower price tag, but there’s a saying for those who like to fly, “How do you end up with a million dollars in aviation?"  Answer, "Easy, you just start out with 2 million!”  Flying is expensive.  But, as I’ve advised my kids, no one should settle easily for “I can’t afford it”, but rather think about “how might I be able to afford it”.  I find I spend a decent amount of time “ideating” on how I might be able to pull it off.   The ideas keep coming.  A partnership would split the overhead costs.  I could get my private pilot dad to go in on a plane together.  I could buy a plane and do a “lease back” to a flight school and make money on it as they rent it out for me.  I can fly by becoming a flight instructor on the side and use the morsel of extra money to rent planes.  I have a half dozen other ideas, but I think it paints the picture - I keep trying to figure out a way to make it work.

 

And then I wonder, “What I’m doing thinking about an expensive recreational activity in the midst of civil unrest, covid, racial injustice and everything else going on in the world?”  At one time I had a time for a practical use planned.  When I was in college I discovered there was such a thing as missionary pilots.  I wanted to be one.  It represented the merging of two of my greatest interests.  I could fly for the healing of the world; something other than a purely recreational use.  I then married someone who was in school pursuing a medical career who was also interested in being a missionary.  I further imagined how wonderfully it could all fit together.

 

It’s now more than 20 years later and I haven’t piloted a plane in 15 years.  My wife works as a nurse and I sell semiconductors.  Maybe we are like Carl and Elie from Pixar's movie “Up".  As young people they dreamed about going far away to Paradise Falls to be explorers.  Despite their efforts, life never allowed them to go on their planned adventure.  But, as Ellie's scrap book captured, they had been on an adventure the whole time.  I’m not living out what I dreamed about twenty some years ago.  What I do experience has much more depth and richness than what I had hoped for.  We have more life - challenge and enjoyment, than the stories our scrap books can tell.

 

As I consider the dreams of the younger version of myself, I would say they played an important role in my life.  The dreams insisted that there was a good future ahead; something worth pushing through all the challenges and heartaches experienced in life.  What I didn’t know is that the treasure wasn’t just in the adventures “far out there”, but in experiencing joy in my close relationships and daily rhythms of life, even in the midst of the challenges.  Dreams, practical or not, still play an important role in shaping my expectation about a future worth venturing into.

 

There are things to be hoped for ahead and perhaps “flying” will serve as the place holder for something that does not yet have a name or shape.  If the ultimate Christian hope is something beyond description, then there is room for my impractical dreams.  I don’t mean that I should seek to attain them at any cost.  Rather, I realize a day is coming when the deepest longings, the kind we were all created with, will be met.  Hebrews 11 describes heroes of faith who attained incredible things during the course of their life, but the conclusion of the chapter says “none of them received what had been promised” (11:39).  The "impractical dreams" that they saw come to fruition were still only a hint of the "something better God has planned for us…together” (11:40).

 

In the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” Morgan Friedman’s character “Red" was warning his friend Andy against impractical hope; to which Andy replied, "Remember, Red, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."