When Childhood Dreams Come True

It was 1957 and Mrs. Parlier's fourth grade class was busy studying geography. We kept our books in the cubby of the desk in front of our old, fold-down seats.  It was time to spend a whole week studying South America, and I pulled out a good, used geography book in which the country of Ecuador was described with black and white photos of llamas on the hillside. As Mrs. Parlier sipped her bottle of ice-cold Coke discreetly covered by a paper napkin, the class read the next chapter on the Incans and prepared for a pop quiz at the end of the chapter and after Mrs. Parlier had finished her Coke.

The pictures in that geography book came to mind a few decades later as I lived in the Andes for a number of years.  As I sat in the living room of our Quito home just around the block from a soccer stadium named for Incan chief Atahualpa, I reflected on my daydream of someday seeing those Andean llamas grazing on the hillside.  In our years there, I became aware that my dreams of childhood had come true. I saw hundreds of llamas and as many hillsides.  I found myself somehow living into that geography book and the black and white photos which had become present and living-color realities.

In that fourth-grade year, I was also cast in a Vacation Bible School program as an “aviation missionary.” I can remember only the first line, “I am a flying missionary…”   My sister and brother laughed at that line because my ears stuck out like wings, always a physical feature about which I was self-conscious!

I thought about that type-casting when I was flying in the 1980’s over Andean mountains, often to extremely remote places, as part of my job as administrative president of the Ecuador mission of our denomination.

From my vantage now as a septuagenarian, I wonder if those fourth-grade dreams were premonitions of a future already envisioned by the Divine, or merely childhood dreams which happened to coincide with decisions I made later in life.  I wonder if those dreams and their recall affected my decisions to be who I am and go where I have gone. To what extent was Providence a part of all I have been and done?  Did those teachers really believe that the study of geography and missions might shape the future of their students?

I am not sure of the answer to those questions, and I don’t really need to know.  What I do know is that I am grateful to Mrs. Parlier and to those VBS teachers who might have seen in me something more than a skinny fourth grader with protruding ears.