Seven hours
Just seven hours until I leave for New Zealand. And I’m doing exactly what I would otherwise do when it’s seven hours out from anything: procrastinating, overanalyzing, pondering, and envisioning myself when I’m done.
I used to do this as a kid, too. In one particularly poignant memory, on more than one occasion and still sometimes in my current life, I will hear my alarm clock buzz in the morning and snooze it. Eventually I get up, go through my morning routine, get dressed, and I amaze myself at the relative speed and efficiency I demonstrate in the process, as I am usually pretty slow-go in the mornings. Then the alarm clock goes off after nine minutes, and I realize that all of that was simply in my mind and now I have to do it all over again, but this time for real.
How many times can I do that in seven hours, I wonder?
In seven hours I will set off for an experience I have been looking forward to since I began seminary, but in a lot of ways will fill a dream I put in front of myself long before. I got to have dinner and drinks with a good friend of mine here in the ‘Cities last night, and we talked a little about dreams and how one’s dream is a dream for a reason, but once it is realized it is, obviously, no longer a dream. Things always look greater in dreams than in real life. It’s not always useful — or even appropriate — to compare the two, however.
In seven hours the dream will become a reality. I’m full of all the excitement and nervousness that entails. I wonder what my next dream will be.
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Daniel Ross-Jones serves as Minister for Youth & Young Adults at First Congregational Church of Palo Alto, United Church of Christ. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a time still measured in months, he is frequently getting lost and discovering treasures of a landscape very different from his Upper Midwestern roots. Green Jello Hotdish is a blog exploring the intersections of his days. 
