A Surprising Dream Come True
Back in October, I had a second dream come true. I got to meet my favorite authors, Sheila Wray Gregoire and Rebecca Lindenbach. I set this dream to be completed this year with relatively low expectations of achieving it. Any dream that requires meeting/interacting with another person can always be trickier because you have to have access to that person.
Sheila lives in Canada, and while I thought of jumping over to her city and shooting my shot at buying her a cup of tea (which I think would have worked), it just didn’t make much sense when I was in Canada. For one thing, I was actually closer to her city at my house in Georgia than I was when we were in Winnipeg, and we have been scraping the bottom of the leave barrel all year so extending our trip just wasn’t feasible.
Earlier this year, though, she announced that her team would be going on a cruise in February of next year, which I immediately signed up for. Don’t worry; it was an open invitation for supporters to join. I’m not being super creepy. While that wouldn’t make this dream come true in 2024, it would be in 2025. We set timelines with our goals to keep us on pace and give some structure for what we are doing, but missing a deadline shouldn’t mean giving up on a dream, especially if I just had to extend two months.
But I believe there is power in writing down our dreams, mainly because it opens us up to opportunities we might not have noticed before. I was heading to Detroit on October 5th for a bridal shower of one of my husband’s cousins. It was a quick trip since I was flying out late on October 4th and returning home the night of the 5th. The 5th was our fifth wedding anniversary, so I wanted to be home for at least some of that day even though I knew that day wouldn’t be our celebration.
About a week before my trip, I got an email about two speaking events that Sheila would be attending, one of which was the night of the 4th in Chicago. Chicago and Detroit are only a four-hour drive apart, so I immediately got to work changing my flight. Instead of flying to Detroit that Friday, I flew into Chicago. I arrived about two hours before the event and was on the first flight out the following morning. I spent about 12 hours in Chicago and almost 6 hours in Detroit. It was a whirlwind trip and everything I could have asked for.
I know they say never to meet your heroes, but if your hero is a fantastic person (and you acknowledge that they are a real person), then it goes pretty perfectly. I’m not going to go into specifics about the interactions I had purely because Sheila is a real person who meets a lot of people. I don’t want to set up any unrealistic expectations. But I got to meet her, get a photo, share some of my story, and get some of her advice. Every piece of that was above and beyond what I expected to come out of that night.
The logistics of this trip were pretty simple, and it might not have happened if the timing hadn’t been perfect. I was already supposed to be away on a trip, meaning we had a childcare plan in place. We can’t spare any of my husband’s leave right now, so we had a babysitter set up to work all day that Friday, and then I was gone on Saturday when my husband was off work. I don’t know that it would have been the same story if I wasn’t already leaving that week.
From a cost perspective, I spent an additional $100 on the trip. That was how much it cost to adjust my flight. I was already planning to pay for the hotel and food, so it didn’t matter if I slept in Detroit or Chicago. It’s definitely girl math, but the way I look at it, it costs me $100 to meet my hero. But I had to be open to the opportunity, have the money in the account, and be ready to take it.
I really didn’t expect this dream to come true this year. I had my sights set on February 2025 to check that off the list, but I am so grateful for how it worked out this year. This experience has only made me more excited for the cruise because I already have the seeds of a relationship to build off of. Never lose hope in a dream coming true on a timeline, and don’t lose patience either because these things are placed in our hearts for a reason, and if we do what it takes, we can see them come to fruition. I had my eyes open for an opportunity and I was fully prepared to jump when it came knocking. That’s the only reason this dream came true for me in 2024.