The Cost of a Dream

The Cost of a Dream

           What does a dream cost? There are many aspects that we must consider.  As with any item one would appraise, we must pick a dream apart to find its true value. Not all dreams are equal, and not all dreams are feasible, but every dream has a value, a cost that must be discovered before it can be purchased or achieved.

          

          We must first know what kind of dream we are appraising. This is perhaps the most complicated part, for how do we endeavor to classify or categorizing something as a priori as our dreams? We must then observe the size and scope of the dream, the feasibility, the time-span, the difficulty, and its intent. These are all essential components to a dream that will affect our appraisal of it.

We finally must look at the dreamer to understand the value of the dream. The most important question is - what is the dream worth to the dreamer? As in reality, a consumer rarely spends a vast amount on any product they feel is worth less than the currency paid. The worth of a dream is often what determines the individual’s level of pursuit.

This pursuit, this chase, is the catalyst, the philosopher’s stone that takes an idea, aspiration, or ideological thought, and changes it into reality.  Only when a dream becomes reality can we understand the veracity of its value.

What we find is this: Our dreams cost only as much as we are willing to pay to see them become reality.

           

Seth Hock - 2011

All of the Words

How do I speak of the indescribable to you?
I will try to explain these feelings that are true.
So looking to the sky I will sing and from my heart to You I bring…

All of the words in all of my life that could never explain and never describe
All of my love, which is nothing to hide so I lift up my hands and I worship,
I worship You.   (All of the Words – By Kutless)

I really feel that way sometimes. I ask “How do I speak of the indescribable to you?” all the time. How do I explain something as amazing as God’s love for me? It seems true that if I could give all of the words in all of my life, it could never explain and never describe all of the love in my life. How can I describe the best thing about me without ruining how special it is? How do I share something so remarkable without getting it turned around and messed up through my flawed understandings? How do I describe the indescribable?

 If you have read my blog before, you might know how I feel about analogies; you might know how misleading they can be. I have sat here trying to think of one that could even be a good start, and each one of them bothered me in some way because they were so incomplete or flawed. All I can say is that God’s love has a way of getting inside of you. It seeps down into the deepest parts of us like a liquid, takes hold and becomes a solid, and then begins to expand outward like light. As that light expands up and out, it grows brighter and warmer; I can then share that light with others. In a world that is cold and dim, God gives a me love that fills this world with joy and peace. Regardless of how messed up this world gets, I am at peace with it.

Because I seek God’s love, I am fastened to a safe and secure foundation. There is nothing else in my life that offers a guarantee to never fall apart, abandon me, or let me down. Not money, not friends, not even family can promise these things. In fact, my family at one time or another has done all three of those things. I love them, and they do try, but they will and have broken my heart. They are some of the best people I know, but they are in no way perfect, and are unfortunately prone to the human condition. There is nothing in this world, human or not, that I can say will never let me down… except for God. Even if I lost my job, my place to live, my family and everything else, there is still one thing that will not fall apart, abandon me, or let me down. God will not crumble, God will not fail. So when I let God get down inside of me, when I let him take hold, when I let him shine through me, I cannot crumble or fail.

Here again, I can’t explain what it’s like to have that kind of peace; the peace to never really have to worry about anything. I do worry, but not like I used to, and even now I only worry when I forget to sit in God’s chair of faith. (I should probably explain that for those of you who aren’t in my Sunday school class). I work constantly to have faith in God like I have faith in chairs. We as people see chairs and we sit in them. We don’t examine the chair; we don’t look at it from all angles, ask for the history of it, or test it. We just sit down in them. Why? Because we have been doing it all of our lives. From the time we were babies till the moment we die, we are using chairs every day. Because we do it every day with success, we build a blind trust in chairs and when we find one, we just sit in it. Now, obviously, God is not a chair, and there are times when chairs do fail, but let’s not get side tracked with the semantics of analogies. The point is, we have such great faith in chairs because we have consistently trusted them to hold us up and they have time and time again proven they will do so. This is how our faith in God should be. I can tell you now from my own experience, God has never let me down, has always held me up, and because of that, it gets easier and easier to trust him. (Okay, rabbit trail completed).

With my peace in God, knowing he will not fail me, and with his light and love dwelling in and overfilling out of me, I am truly happy. I live a life full of joy, lacking nothing. God’s love has changed me and has made me a better person for it; which is why I believe in him. I read the Bible, go to church and pray to God not because I think some guy in the cloud told me to. I don’t believe what I do so that one day I won’t go to hell or be punished. I believe what I do because it is the best way I know of to live. I don’t know every philosophy there is, but out of the ones I have studied in my education or elsewhere, nothing compares to God and his love.

So I figure I have done a pretty poor job of explaining how amazing God’s love is. I know I haven’t even scratched the surface of describing how happy he makes me, how he quiets the calamity around me and gives me peace, how he empowers me to do things I would never have done without him, how he makes me free to live the best life a person can. Because I can’t describe the indescribable as well as I would like, as Kutless said, I guess I will just lift my hands and worship God.

One of the Last Good Ones

So as most of you know, I am married now! A week and a half ago, I married my girlie and we both vowed to spend the rest of our lives together. As I was getting ready to depart from the wedding reception that night, my little brother stopped me and told me something. He said “Brother, you got one of the last good ones, I am happy for you.” Normally that would be a compliment enough, but if you know my little brother, you know means a lot.

Ya know… I really have to agree with him! While she isn’t the last good one, she is rare. She isn’t perfect, but I certainly wouldn’t want her to be. She isn’t exactly what I would have created if I had built her from scratch; She is, however, exactly who she needs to be to make me happy. She is good, and at the end of the day, I don’t need to ask for more than that.   

I want to take this opportunity to thank her for the meals she makes and for all the little and big things she has done to get us moved and settled into our new place. She made a lot of really stressful things a whole lot easier. So thank you darlin, I really do appreciate it…

While I have no doubts about the hardships of marriage, being married to such a good wife is certainly going to make it easier. We already 8 fantastic years down the line from where we started, and I figure if we got another 60 amazing years left to explore life together. So to my wife, Mrs. Hock, who is good and beautiful and the woman who makes me happy!

Celebration of Bachelor-Hood!

                At some time around 11:00 a.m. Saturday morning, I was rudely, if not violently awakened by 7 men coming into my room and attempting to kidnap me. I was wrestled to the floor, where I was sat on and bound with duck-tape. My hands were bound behind my back, my feet were taped together, and I was then rolled up in a blanket tied up with a rope and carried out of my room. I was laid, face down on the stairs and allowed to slide step by step down. I was then carried by these men who were in fact my “friends” and thrown into the back of a truck! (Mind you I had only been awake for maybe ten minutes at that point.)

I was driven around for maybe 20 minutes, in which time I was craftily able to escape from the tape and rope confines. Once we stopped my captors gave me some clothes to wear, this was much appreciated, as I had been kidnapped in only my boxers. They gave me a shirt that said GROOM and a kilt to wear. I donned my apparel and joined Keith, Luis, Bobby, Jed, Joel, Phil, and Rudy for lunch at Los Cucos. After lunch we went to “No Label Brewery” and spent a good hour or so there with our group and Roland Gomez. After turning in the rest of our tickets to fill a growler, we went to see Captain America at Cinemark Theatre. Which by the by is a pretty decent film, the actor playing Cap was dead on.

                After the movie we went to Specs and picked up some cigars and some other drinks, and continued on to Jacob and Gigi Dowdens house warming and had amazing Bar-B-Q. I will take this moment to say that the Downdens have a lovely home and I want to say thank you for allowing my party to pass through. And pass through we did. The final stop for the evening was the Parker House Hold, where we spent the rest of the night sitting in a giant circle, talking, laughing smoking and drinking. Two of my friends felt it necessary to shock me with a tasser, but other than that the night was an absolute blast.

                So thank you to my friends for a fantastic bachelor party. I really did have a lot of fun, and I will have a lot of fun re-telling this story for a long time.

One of my favorite Bill Bryson passages.

An Excerpt from "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did - possibly to the nanosecond - you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.

Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations ... and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare ... and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors ...

At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings our existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest - actually quite a lot of incest - albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family has procreated with some distant cousin from your father's ... In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or café or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: "Me, too!" In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family. - Bill Bryson

I love this concept! At the level of the building blocks of human beings, we are all somehow related to one another. I wonder what would happen if we all were to start thinking of those around us as family instead of strangers? The problem (well okay, A… problem) with human beings is our innate fascination with categorizing EVERYTHING.

Now before you get the wrong idea, categorization is, I will confess a very helpful tool for structuring our lives. It helps us take a large amount of data and make shortcuts through all of it. However, we tend to get carried away when we apply this tool to humans. We categorize people by gender, race, height, weight, religion, income level, who you were born too, where you were born at, when you were born, even how you were born, your voting preferences, hair, eye and teeth color, your education, your accent, and many, many other things.

Now it can be helpful to group people together for certain reasons; and these categories are not bad in and of themselves. It is what we do after we put people into these categories that cause problems. See, after we have created our shortcuts of figuring out who belongs where, we tend to burn the bridges connecting us all together. We use the categories to separate ourselves from others, and then we try to advance one category over another. And, as we can all agree, we then get a whole mess of problems.

And it’s all silly to me. We are all so closely tied together that things like income level, or place of birth shouldn’t have anything to do with how we treat one another. Who you voted for, should have no bearing on who you invite into your home. What God you believe in should not stop you from loving others wholly and completely.

If you know me, you know that my family isn’t perfect; and I know the family can be a broken place to be. So perhaps saying we are all family doesn’t bring the best images to your mind. However, I feel like a family, in its strongest, best moments is a goal worth shooting for. People caring for each other, understanding that though you don’t think exactly like me, I am going to love you no matter what. We forgive each other, we defend each other, we look out for one another. That is what a family does in it finest moments. It is a pack that makes sure everyone succeeds.  

What would our world look like, not if we could all be family, but if we realized we already are?
 

Busy

So this is has been the busiest month of my life! I am working full time, taking 2 summer courses (one of which has me reading 2-3 chapters a week and turning discussions and 50 question quizzes for each). I am trying to find a new place to live, pack up the place I am living, planning a wedding and getting married in under 3 weeks! I think I am trying to sleep and and find time to relax somewhere in all of that as well...

So I haven't written in a while as a result. I don't have time to write a lot, but I will say this.

I love my family. While it is crazy (just like everyone's family) and sometimes it feels like herding cats to get them all in place at one time, they are an amazing bunch. I can't always say I would make the same choices they do, and with that I am sometimes surprised at both their success and failures. But in all the decisions we make, good or bad, my family has always been there for me. We may not all be there at the same time, but one way or the other, these imperfect people that I am related too make the effort to make sure I succeed. At the end of the day, while I may ask more out of them than they can give sometimes, I am content with who they are and am glad for it. So thanks to my family, both immediate and extended, both by blood and social bond, both old and new. Without yall I couldn't pull off such a crazy schedule, without yall I wouldn't have the family I love.    

I'M GETIN HITCHED

     So if you haven’t heard already…I’M GETTING MARRIED! The wedding is on July 30^th in the mystical land of Kansas. Amber Beeson has put this wedding stuff off for way too long, so I finally said look, “You and I are getin hitched!” She of course could not deny such a manly and hardly ambiguous proposal! She said she had nothing better to do that day, so….IT’S GONNA BE EPIC! I expect everyone I have ever known to be in attendance (that means you). As the first Hock child to be wedded, I of course am taking the “lavished gifts of the gods” feat; which is only available to level 15 monks, clerics and the first groom of each Hock generation.  Details will follow shortly on where you may go and seek out such gifts! We are excited to begin our campaign to find happiness, slay giants, change the world and naturally reach epic levels.  Amber is and has been my closest friend for some time now. The fates set out to put us in close proximity at an early age, and brought us closer and closer in a spiraling dance of love, HAM and defying odds. Two people of such power, creativity, good looks, wisdom, and potential could only be destined to join their forces to take on the challenge of life. We hope you will join us at the character creation of the new player Seber, or Ameth, (we haven’t decided on a name yet). We expect to hit 5 18’s!

Love you guys!