Good messages often contain something that remains with the listener well after that message ends. This was true for me with a recent sermon in our “Power and Authority of a Submissive Heart” series. Near the end of the message Pastor Chris said something that struck a deep chord of personal meaning in me. To paraphrase him he said that sometimes we must die to our dreams in the course of allowing God’s true will to be dome in our lives, but that sometimes He fulfills those dreams later. I would add that when he does fulfill those dreams it is usually in a way we never would have expected.

Such was the case with me.

I have had a passion for aviation for as long as I can remember. There was never a time when I didn’t look to the sky when an airliner flew over (including as my soon to be bride was walking down the aisle at our outdoor wedding, but that is a different story!) During my childhood, teen, and young adult years my goal was to make aviation my career, ultimately in airport operations at a big facility like JFK. I went to college for aviation management while simultaneously pursuing my parallel passion for airline history and memorabilia collecting. By the time I was 22 I had the career I thought I wanted right out of school and probably the largest collection of commercial aviation historical material of anyone my age.

That year, however also saw the personal crisis that led me from Atheism to knowing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of my life. Around that time I also found myself feeling revulsion to anything aeronautical! I quit the job I had worked so long to get and put my entire collection in storage. There were a number of factors not relevant to this blog that influenced these decisions but a major reason was that as a new believer I realized my, more than a little obsessive, interest in airplanes had been an idol in my life. It was something with which I tried to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped hole” in my heart.

For nearly a decade after my conversion I pretty much ignored aviation. I worked in mental health and educational publishing. I also went back to school a for Christian liberal arts degree at Nyack College and eventually went on to seminary. Unfortunately for a number of reasons, including some self-entered motives on my part, my new dream to go into full-time ministry in my early thirties was clearly thwarted. It seemed that God was putting up a large and, at the time, traumatic wall in front of my personal aspirations in that area (again, a story for another time). I was confused and depressed by this to say the least and wondered what God’s will for my life really was. Those were dark days.

One day in 1999, I was walking on a beach in Florida talking to Him and He suddenly spoke to me (not audibly, but in my mind and heart) and said that He wanted aviation back in my life. It was the beginning of an understanding that it actually was God, through my dad, who had put my passion for airplanes in me as a small boy…long before I knew Him.

The first thing I felt Him telling me to do was sell almost all of my collection that had been sitting in storage for nine years, but somehow add a ministry aspect to the selling. I did this by sending an aviation-themed tract in every package of every item I sold on eBay during the next several years. Simultaneously he blessed me with a huge profit on selling that collection. Then he led me to volunteer tour guide for an air museum in Northern, NJ. That became a paid position and within five years I was executive director of the facility! Meanwhile He graciously gave me back my passion for airline collecting and I began to build a much smaller collection, often at aviation collectible shows where I gave out more of those aviation tracts. They came from a Christian airline employee ministry in which I was later to become deeply involved. With aviation now in its proper subordinate position under God I found myself enjoying it even more than I had as an Atheist many years before!

Then, last year, circumstances at the museum combined with my wife Kat and my newfound love for our newfound church, True Life, combined (Divinely, I believe) to open the door to my leaving my job of 16 years and entering into the pastoral apprenticeship I now am privileged to be in at our church. Today I again look to a future in ministry, God willing. At the same time I am still involved in the airline history community and am both collecting and doing some work in the aviation history field, part-time.

So now I have, in a sense, the best of both worlds. I have a confidence that God Himself has actually fulfilled two dreams from earlier in my life, to pursue my love for aviation and, far more importantly, to pursue serving him in vocational ministry. God destroyed my earlier dreams, which I wanted in my own way and my own time, and replaced them with His dreams which incorporated both of the earlier ones, but were in His will and timing.

Not surprisingly all of this has often seemed very counterintuitive for me through the last 28 years, but now it is beginning to make perfect sense as I understand more and more that His ways are not my own. In fact they are much better. You see, He knows what He is doing in even the most confusing and trying times of our lives as He brings about His mysterious, but perfect will, for His children.

For me the last three decades have been all about the loss of and then the restoration of my dreams in ways that are far, far greater than anything I could ever have come up with for myself.

For that, may God be praised!