WHEN I was 8, I wanted to be a teacher. I remember my third grade teacher clicking the chalk on the green board on the wall. And when I was 9, I wanted to be a director. My parents bought me a camera for Christmas, and my cousins and I would recreate our favorite movies in the yard. When I was 11, I wanted to be a writer. I remember classmates telling me how terrible my stories were. While they probably weren’t, it felt like a crowd of kids surrounding me, pointing and laughing. I went home and ripped the pages over and over, trying to hold back tears. I thought, “No one will ever read another word I write.” The 11-year-old me was wrong. My story — my dream — didn’t end there; it was just the beginning. Today, I can offer you living proof that the wildest dreams do come true.
Our dreams are like shooting stars across the night sky. They’re beautiful; they’re exciting. We think, “How in the world does that work?” And we spend our entire lives chasing that shooting star. We spend every day, step after step, trying to make our dreams come true. Dreams don’t always take off into space like a rocket. Sometimes, we land too hard. Sometimes, we never get off the launchpad. Thankfully, we have the launchpad we need. Our hometown is a place where dreams come true, and this issue of Good News Magazine is living proof of that.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” The goal of this issue is to prove your dreams are beautiful and the future is brightly dazzling. The truth is, the shooting star has always been inside us — we just had to realize it. GN
