When I Grow Up

During my formative years I always wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to fly airplanes! Happily, I flew many times while I was growing up. During my life in the military I flew four-engine bombers. After I got out I still flew quite a bit. I was a good pilot, but it was at that time I realized that I would never be a great pilot and at the end of the war there were thousands of great pilots. It was at that time that I realized that God gives each of our body’s limitations and I had to learn to accept that fact. That was the day I learned that my “want to be” would never make me great! My decision that day helped keep my life ever exciting. It opened my door to a new world of “try it you may like it.” And, suddenly I found that my world was full of new and exciting things for me to try! Even today, I find my world full of “when I grow up, things I want to be!” I realized that if I found myself doing something I didn’t like to do or doing something that I really wasn’t good at, maybe I shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. As most of you know, I talk to many people. A few days ago I talked to a man who had the dream of playing pro baseball. He said he was good at it and had a scholarship. Half way through his college, one day he started out his door for practice. Then he stopped! At that instant he quit playing the game! He said he realized that he wanted more out of his life than practice and schedules. He said that he felt he had fulfilled his dream but found himself wanting more. I talk to many older men and women that have lost mates of fifty or more years. Many of them find themselves lost. I wonder if they didn’t have dreams when they were younger. With today’s world so full of things to do, surely they could find exciting things to do. I ask a friend what she had wanted to be and her answer surprised me. She said that; she always wanted to play music and while growing up she was getting good at it. Then, she changed teachers; he would only accept music played “his way,” she felt that everything she had learned or felt in her heart was wrong. One day she played something differently than she was told and he hit her across the hand with a ruler! That day she walked away from music and the desire in her heart! It was many years until she could again start to play because each time she started to play, she could feel the pain from that bully’s ruler across her hand. Surprisingly, sometimes it takes less than a second to change a person’s dreams forever. I keep on trying to decide what I want to be. My trying has helped me to learn what I can do with what my God gave me to work with. It has helped me learn my limitations and how to work within them and maybe most important, how to accept those limitations. I have reached many goals that I set for my life. I think that by reaching my goals and being satisfied with my accomplishments and then setting new goals has made my life exciting. I can’t remember a time that I failed to reach a goal, but I have learned what my limitations are. I treat each new goal as a learning experience. In my world of today, I have found that many of the dreams and opportunities at the time of my growing up, and that was almost eight decades ago, have changed or disappeared. And, my ability to learn new things is far beyond the dreams of our fathers or even my early growing up. As my world progresses, new unheard of opportunities for me may open up tomorrow. So I’ll wait until tomorrow to tell you what I want to be.