Realizations: Guest Post from my 12 year old daughter

February 6, 2016

Last night I had a really good dream. I got to see my uncle Chris when he was little. It wasn’t the most accurate dream, but it was so much fun. So why did I wake up in tears?

Well, my uncle Chris is dead, and after I woke up, I felt really bad that I didn’t get to know him very well while he was alive. He died when he was 27—I think–but I had just turned 2. I don’t remember much about him—well really I don’t remember him at all. People tell me how he used to watch Barnie with me, and I would sit on his lap in his wheelchair and have a lot of fun (that I don’t remember). I’ve seen some pictures of him with me, but I can’t actually remember him. When I woke up this morning, I wished I had.

People have also told me things about him that weren’t related to me. He really cared for the environment, and he loved money. He used to collect soda tabs to give to the Ronald McDonald House, and now I collect them too (although my dad told me they were worthless and didn’t really help, so I was kind of frustrated at that). I remember one story where his grandma (my great-grandma), Omi, said that he could have her money (ten dollars) if he gave her his money (five dollars). He didn’t realize the value of the money, so he said something like, “You can’t trick me into giving you more money!” He had disabilities, but that didn’t stop him from caring and giving. He had a service dog named Butch. My mom kept some of her school journals from when she was younger, and in a couple of them she wrote about Chris’s different brain tumors and how it scared her. Chris was very kind, and loved giving to the world.

My dream wasn’t that special, but the small, weird moments still counted for me. I had a bunch of other mini dreams before getting to the parts with Chris, but they aren’t important right now.

In my dream, I had watched a video of my sister playing with Chris in a water park (which wasn’t very realistic since my sister was born 6 years after me, so she never actually met Chris at all). He was still dead in my dream, but there was a magical way I could see him (SO REALISTIC). Our cat, Topanga, was Chris trapped inside a cat’s body (I fell asleep watching “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”, so), and the memory of my dream is starting to fade away, but somehow my cousins Laurel and Gabe and I were transported to one of Chris’s birthday parties from when he was a little kid. We had a lot of fun there, although all I can remember now is exactly that. He was wearing an orange shirt, and my cousins and I were all wearing purple sweatshirts, so somehow that became important to the story. When we had to leave, Gabe’s mom, Sintia, pointed out that I was now wearing an orange shirt (how?). If I was wearing the orange shirt, then Chris was wearing the purple shirt, and we couldn’t ever visit him again. That is about it for the part with Chris, but when I woke up, it felt so much more special.

Yesterday, I was telling my sister, Camryn, and my brother, Lukas, how dreams are very special because things that can’t happen in real life can happen in dreams. That’s exactly what happened in my dream, so that was part of the special part.

The most special part of all was that the conversation with my siblings started with God. Lukas was saying that God was not real (which I hoped was just a phase to get attention). I kept asking him why he felt this way, and he was saying how nothing really special happens. Camryn was asking, “How do we hear God?” and I told her how he did things if we believed in him. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4. This was what I was trying to tell Camryn, and Camryn was saying something like, “He can’t do weird things like bring unicorns to life, right?” And I told her that he can. My brother responded to that with, “And he can bring dinosaurs and unicorns to life, too?” and I told him that he can. They asked me why he doesn’t, and being only 12 years old, I didn’t have a very sure answer for them, so I just responded with a simple, “I don’t know.” Then I started saying, “I know that he can give us these things in dreams, and that’s why dreams are so cool.”

This experience from the other day made me think that my dream was a lucky present from God. I don’t know why I deserved a present, but I was thankful for it anyways. So thankful that I burst into tears.

I kept praying to God and thanking him, but I still didn’t understand why I got this present. I burst into tears, as I kept thinking about how Chris died, and I wanted to know him better. So I prayed for God to tell Chris how I felt. Then I thought of how two days before today was the day that marked a year that my great-aunt, Laurie, died. She was older than Chris when she died, but her death still made me feel bad because she was family. I am just realizing this now, but this dream taught me a lesson about family.

Pretty soon, I was crying about every unfair death in the world. It wasn’t fair that little children died of poverty and starvation. It wasn’t fair that terrorist attacks were happening around the world. Nothing was fair. Life isn’t meant to be fair. Then I prayed to God about all of these things, knowing that he can help. He is the help that we all, that is, everyone in the universe, needs.

The verse that I used above, Psalm 37:4, means that if you love the Lord, He can give you what you want. My mom helped me find this verse, and she said that He can also change your heart. That was what had happened this morning. God changed my heart. I love unicorns, and I always wished they were real. I wished for them on like, 3 birthday cakes. But this dream made me realize that I don’t value unicorns as much as I value family. And I couldn’t value family without valuing God. So, people who are reading this, and people who aren’t reading this but need this, love and put your faith in God. He might just change your heart.