I was like the ball for a tetherball pole. I soared up, up, up so high. The pole I was connected to took me as high as the rope seemed to want to stretch. High enough that I was in the galaxy looking down at the earth. Then I was swooping low and just glazing above the tips of the trees. I was low enough to look on the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary lawn. Being completely at ease I let the rope whoosh me around. I was filled with excitement and awe. How exhilarating, but quietly so, to swing up to the highest heights in the dark, still and silence of the holy heavens and then down to the realm where the birds are communing and chatting among the trees in one of the safest kinds of settings you can imagine. This dream deepened me. I woke from it with a sense of cleanliness and goodness, but not all dreams do this.

Our North American context encourages people – especially young ones – to “follow your dreams.”  When I’ve heard this phrase it refers to doing what you want to do in life. It encourages focusing on yourself and doing whatever and following whatever path necessary to actualize your wants.  I’ve never been a fan of that phrase. Frankly, I don’t want to tell my child that she should, “follow her dreams.” At least not in the ways our culture encourages people. If it’s a literal dream, that’s different. If she’s redirected to go a different route through a dream then have at it, child. If the dream has to do with fulfilling yourself and your wants/desires, then we’re gonna have to have a little chat. I want the best for her, but that actually means taking into account the needs of others and leaning on the wisdom and dream of the church (broken as it can be sometimes) to find fulfillment. 

The meaning of my tetherball dream has yet to be determined, but it reminds me of a Lutheran supervisor who commented that of all the young people he worked with I had the strongest sense of the universal and the particular. I can swing up and out and see the whole picture. I can see the world, but I can swing low and see the small things: the birds, the tree tips, the particular yards with their particular auras. Looking back I wonder if perhaps this was God’s way of sharing His dream with me. Writing this feels like unhelpful boasting, but let me balance the pride. I truly believe that what he saw in me was one of the biggest strengths of my community. For Mennonites, community is of utmost importance and these people certainly shape me.

I attend a church that has a significant number of people who travel the world for their work. That’s part of what it means to be a church leader these days, I guess. So we’re always hearing about people in other countries. Mennonites also happen to be very involved with other countries through Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Mission Network and Mennonite Disaster Service among other organizations. We get involved with people in other places, but not just for short mission trips. One family in our congregation lived in Ivory Coast for years. As in, their children were raised there until they moved to the States when the two oldest were in high school.

The church community also has another emphasis though. We focus on loving our neighbors. Love the ones who are poor, who are crusty, who have a different political leaning than yourself and who have a different worldview. Stay where you’re located and learn to love. Even when the neighborhood begins to disintegrate. When certain kinds of people refuse to drive down the street where we worship because they’re scared. Stay where you are and keep loving your neighbors. One dream of the Mennonite Church is that we find ways to care about neighbors as much as we care for ourselves and as much as we care for people around the world.

My parents lived out this dream when they spent their first years of marriage volunteering in Africa. They had small amounts of water and very little in terms of material possessions. They were there to teach. My dad taught woodworking. Mom taught home-economics. Both odd things to teach people who have survived for generations before with no problem, but that experience changed my parents. It made them strange when they returned home. They didn’t fit in because they had seen that the world is so much bigger, but then they were called to care for the ones around them even when they were misunderstood. 

The way this dream of loving neighbors plays out in my life as a stay at home mother is that my prayers and work stay mostly close to home. I know there’s a whole, huge world that hurts on so many levels, but my attention has been on the local. Very local. As in, yard local. This may sound silly to some people, but neighbors I pray for now are our birds, our flowers and trees. I pray for people in our neighborhood and I pray that the good people in our area will connect. I want their goodness and love to connect so it creates deeper goodness. I’m also working on bike advocacy in this small part of our town and that seems significant in its own small way.

My new dream isn’t one that plays out in my sleep. It’s a dream I hold while fully awake. I want our daughter to capture this ability to see the large picture – and care for it. I also want her to recognize the small pieces of life around her that need attention – and care for them. And so I continue praying and acting.

When I pray for the birds I’m praying for something small and particular, but birds, flowers and trees point to a much larger truth – the reality of ecosystems. I want our child to find awe and wonder in birds and in the ways our world is held together. I pray for neighbors and good, strong connections because creating goodness and love here (brace yourself because it sounds cheesy) adds to world peace. I pray for this here because I believe that caring for nature and people here has ripple effects. I work on things like bike paths because I want her to smell morning air, and feel wind on her body. I want her to exercise and think about not polluting the earth so that others can enjoy the things she enjoys. My dream is that she will find goodness and joy in ways that resemble my tetherball dream. I want her, myself and others to soar up and observe the whole picture and swoop low to look at the particular so that we can love this great, gorgeous world God created. May it be so.