I really enjoy cooking. This might be a little known fact about me, but I really do enjoy whipping up a delicious meal in the kitchen. I'm pretty good at it too, but I am biased as I usually cook food that I really enjoy. This leaves pretty slim odds for me not liking whatever is for dinner, because I know exactly how I like things to be cooked...
I also like to experiment with foods and making things that I have not had the chance to cook before, so about 9 months ago, I decided I wanted to roast a chicken. "How hard could it be?" I thought. Answer, actually not too difficult. So one night when we had a friend of my wife's staying with for a couple of days, I decided to give it a go.
Not to come across as arrogant, but I had made a very delicious chicken. If my memory suites me, (which this might just be how I want to remember things) the three of us ate the entire chicken and when all was said and done, we were left with only a chicken carcass sitting on the cutting board.
Now if you have spent some quality time with me, you will know that I am a dreamer. So when I saw that chicken carcass sitting on the cutting board, I really only had one thought... I was going to make chicken stock...from scratch.
Did I have any idea how to do this? No, but that did not matter to me because I had a perfectly good chicken carcass sitting on my cutting board and a head full of dreams. It was perfect. On the other hand I did just eat a lot of chicken, or maybe I was just "chickening out," (ha!), but I decided that this dream of mine wouldn't explode if I deferred it a bit. So I took that chicken carcass, shoved it into a storage container, and put it in the back of the freezer.
You know what I'm talking about:
- Toilet Paper
- Paper Towels
- Trash Bags
- Fruit Snacks
- Lasagna
- Pot Stickers
- 8 Pounds of Popcorn
This was my actual list, and as you can see, I only got the things that were really, really essential.
When I got home, I went about putting things away and found a home for everything, but our freezer was a bit full so I decided to reorganize things a bit. Much to my chagrin, there in the back of the freezer was the chicken carcass that I had stuck there 9 months earlier.
Yes, I had kept a frozen chicken carcass in the back of our freezer for 9 months.
Now, I had seen this particular container many times since then, and would usually think to myself, "I wonder what is in there..." But this time, it hit me.
There is a dead animal in there.
In that container, there is a dead animal that I had put there to eventually be made into a delicious soup. A dead animal that was now so freezer burned, it was barely recognizable, and made me feel more and more disgusted the more I thought about it.
The time had come. It had to go. That 9 month old chicken carcass made its way all the way from our freezer, into our trashcan, and out to the dumpster behind our apartment, never to be seen again.
Most dreams need to be pursued, but some of them, especially the really bad ones, need to be extracted from the far reaches of your freezer and taken out with the trash.
And lets be real, if your dream is to make chicken stock from a chicken carcass, you need to get a better dream.
If you can defer your dream for 9 whole months and not give two thoughts to it, you probably need to get a better dream.
God did not create us to be people who float through our lives, never looking to either side. God created us to see the turmoil the world has found itself in and do our part to restore it to the way that it was originally intended to be.
I don't want to dream of making chicken stock anymore. I would rather dream of impacting the lives of the people around my through my writing. I want to dream of passing on the things that I have learned to future generations. I want to have dreams that are looking to the betterment of the world around me, and not just the betterment of the food inside me.
I want to have dreams that are worth pursuing now even if that means slow progress toward them over a long period of time. I want to have dreams that are worth not shoving in a freezer for 9 months, but if for some reason they have to be, I hope that they will have been strong enough and noble enough to not be repulsive when they come back out on the other side.
What do you want to dream about?
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