MV Winter 2016 Page 2

By Emily “Emy” Wood

You’re in the grocery aisle faced with a decision: buy the organic potatoes for $3.50 or the inorganic for $1.50. The price tag alone will complete the decision for most shoppers. But if you’re one of the growing number of people wanting to eat organically grown, non-GMO foods without breaking the bank, solutions exist. Buying organic food isn’t only the smart option for your health, but it can also be a smart option for your wallet. Following these basic tips can help you avoid pesticide-rich products for less.

Make Choices

To avoid GMO foods is to avoid anything containing ingredients that might possibly be genetically modified. Corn, soybeans, zucchini, yellow squash, canola, sugar beets, papaya, and cottonseed oil are all high risk GMO crops. When buying packaged food, always read the ingredients to see if it contains any by-products from one of these (such as fructose corn syrup). If it does, look for the USDA organic label before purchasing.

When eating healthfully, we can’t always afford to over-haul our diets overnight. An easy way to lessen the burden is to make choices. Cutting meat and dairy from your diet is one of the cheapest ways to save money when buying organic. If you’re going to eat animal products, though, make this area the top priority for organic purchases. Conventional animal products are laden with a deadly combo of pesticides, antibiotics, and growth hormone exposure. Do not cut costs on meat.

If overhauling your entire cabinet and fridge seems over-whelming, begin with the most important foods and work your way up. The Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides identifies produce with the highest pesticide residue, named their “Dirty Dozen.” This list includes: strawberries, apples, nectarines, peaches, celery, grapes, cherries, spinach, tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers. Make buying the organic versions of these products your priority. Conversely, the “Clean 15” lists produce with lowest pesticide residue. Luckily for you, this means you don’t necessarily need to buy organic produce for the following: avocados, pineapples, cabbage, sweet peas, onions, asparagus, mangoes, kiwi, eggplant, honeydew, grapefruit, cantaloupe, and cauliflower.

Buy in Bulk

After prioritizing produce for organic and non-GMO shopping, an easy way to increase the organic food in your life is to buy bulk grains, legumes, and nuts. Even if you can’t swing shopping at Costco or Sam’s Club, many stores now have bulk food dispensers. Buying items like rice, cereals, beans, nuts, and oats in bulk may seem more expensive initially, but it is cheaper in the long run. Also, if you notice a sale on organic potatoes at a farmers market or a huge slash on the price of organic frozen vegetables, buy more! If you’re budgeting weekly, I recommend stashing $5 each week for the “buy bulk and stash” category.

Buy Seasonally and Locally—or Grow!

If you’re looking to buy fruits or vegetables out of season, buy them frozen. Organic frozen goods are typically cheaper. Whenever possible, try attending local farmers markets. While this means you can only buy in-season produce, you can usually score good deals—especially if you go towards the close of the market. Make friends with some of the organic farmers and they may let you in on more deals, too.

Another way to lessen the financial burden of healthy eating is to grow food yourself. Easy gardening ideas include starting a simple window planter filled with herbs. Other easy-to-grow indoor crops include carrots, garlic greens, micro greens, scallions, tomatoes, and ginger. Buy seeds or starter kits organically.

Some General Tips

The easiest and cheapest tip for eating more organic and non-GMO food is to avoid purchasing packaged items. Some companies seem to double the price for anything with an organic label. By limiting your intake of sweets and extra packaged products, you can cut your grocery bill significantly. And, by removing processed foods, you can avoid nearly all GMOs commonly found in ingredients like soy lecithin, high fructose corn syrup, and other additives.

Another way to save is to look for deals like coupons and rebate apps. Ibotta and Checkout 51 are great rebate apps that often give coupons like “$0.25 off produce.” In-store apps (think Sprouts or Target), can get you double savings and more coupons. Instead of buying brand name, try choosing the organic generic version of various products such as Simply Nature by Aldis. Store ads often have sales on organic goods, so make it a priority to watch your local paper or sign up for emails.

Get to Cooking

As time consuming as cooking from scratch can be, it saves buckets of cash. And it typically means healthier meals with greater control over ingredients. An easy way to cut your kitchen time in half is to double your recipe and freeze half for later use. Use the slow cooker to make bulk soups and casseroles. Leftovers? Throw them together to make a hearty casserole or add some flour and flax meal to make quick bake/fry patties.

Do Your Best!

I wish there was a magical way to save money and eat healthy. Just like exercise, eating organically takes time and dedication. In the long-run—and even short-term—buying more organic foods will benefit your health. If you begin to lose motivation or forget why you went organic in the first place, try checking out some great documentaries like Forks Over Knives, Food, Inc., Food Matters, Simply Raw, and The Future of Food, or books such as To Buy or Not to Buy Organic, A Field Guide to Buying Organic, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and Organic Manifesto. We all need a little reminder of our priorities every now and again. Remember: you’re doing your best, even if it’s just one more piece of organic produce at a time.

Emily “Emy” Wood is a senior communications major with emphases in emerging media and public relations at Union College.

By Kiefer Dooley

Techno-centered culture is stifling the ability of young people to interact in authentic, thoughtful, and sincere face- to-face conversations. More than that, it is changing the way we all live. Rapidly-developing technology impacts nearly every facet of our lives. Technological advancements in communication, specifically the development and use of social media platforms, profoundly affect our social development, education, family life, relationships, job searches, and views of things like politics and religion.

This radical shift toward primarily social-media-driven communication is changing our culture. Are we, as a Church, adapting to this profound change on the basis of how our individual worldviews are shaped, molded, and influenced? RMC’s youth department is grappling with this question in a search for the best way to reach our young people. Communication today is so different than what I experienced as a sophomore in high school at Ozark Academy in late 2008. I remember the first person to own a smartphone in our class. He was the envy of the entire student body. It was an iPhone 3G. This guy could easily access Facebook (then only 4 years old) on his phone! He could play games like Doodle Jump where the onscreen character reacted to the physical position and movements of the device using a sensor called an accelerometer. No one else could post a status to Facebook on his or her phone, much less play a game any more advanced than Screen Snake (a game where the user controls a dot “snake” around the screen with directional arrows. The snake eats other dots’ “food” and grows a pixel in length. When the snake grows so large that the user cannot keep it from running into itself, game over!). The rest of us were using flip-phones or Blackberries with physical keyboards, the greatest function being the ability to send short text messages.

Today, I see 12-year-olds carrying smartphones that have as much computing power as the laptop I used throughout college. The presence and interconnectedness of social media has also increased dramatically. Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram—these things did not exist a mere 5 to 8 years ago. We now see what amounts to the entire world at our fingertips and it may not be all for the best.

Smartphones perpetuate our ability to dive into social media at any time and often take away the need for face-to-face communication. It happens in my life all the time. Potentially awkward situation? Tired and don’t feel like talking to someone? Waiting in line by myself at Chipotle?

Any situation where I might begin to feel a twinge of insecurity, the easy answer is to pull out the phone and become immersed in a world of entertainment, news, likes, hearts, emoji faces, games, pictures, video shares, ads, thoughts, music—the list of distractions could seemingly go on forever. It is a parallel reality that is available at any time, but that ceases to exist as soon as the battery dies. It’s a world of thousands of superficial communications that quickly and easily take the place of substantial real-life interaction.

While the quantity of communication is enhanced by technology, the content remains surface level. A “long” text message is probably 150 words. If a long text message doubles to 300 words, it’s an epistle. Really? That is so short! Yet, most of our communication occurs in this manner. An entire relationship, of the dating variety, can develop and crumble with 80 percent of the communication occurring via text message. The messages fly back and forth, short snippets of thought in a steady stream of consciousness.

And it is not just texting that encourages quantity over quality. While Twitter limits the number of characters per “tweet” to 140, in an unprecedented move, Twitter recently released an update where photos, videos, animated GIFs, and polls will not count against the 140-character limit. Snapchat communication occurs in even shorter statements, utilizing a roughly 80-character limit for photo captions. Facebook allows posts to utilize an unheard of 63,206 characters.

But does anyone spew this much information in a single post? Hardly. According to research done by Maximilian H. Nierhoff, a writer for the Social Media Analytics Blog “Quintly,” the majority of Facebook posts fall between 2 and 103 characters. Nierhoff’s study took into account 13.5 mil- lion Facebook posts, finding that the distribution of posts by character length strongly resembles a bell curve with a peak at 2 characters and a strong drop off in number of posts beyond the 600 character mark.

A highly-managed and intentionally-cultivated image of many of our (young) people lies in these tidbits of information that spew out to the vast reaches of the Internet. As a collective, we only post what we are OK with people seeing. And what we are OK with others seeing largely depends on the target audience. Young people continuously participate in a sort of subconscious filtering of social media posts and are, in effect, continuously advertising themselves to others. Taking a brief look at some of the major social media platforms and the average content as associated with the intended (or perceived) audience substantiates this assumption. A few of the most popular social media platforms include LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.

LinkedIn is highly regulated and very professional (the target user group is those older young people who are look- ing for full-time employment). Only the best about a person would appear on the LinkedIn profile. It is, in essence, a resume on steroids. A LinkedIn profile often has one or two very professional photos, a purpose statement from a recent resume, and a few paragraphs describing one’s academic achievements as well as goals and aspirations.

A Facebook profile tends to let a more “natural” expression of a person appear. The page may include a profile picture taken at just the right angle, a few photos from a weekend get together with some friends, and maybe a “rant’ intermingled among the litany of posts that show the best parts of a person’s life. A hurrah for summiting that most recent fourteener, a picture of an academic achievement, a cheer for a sports team, a lament over the current political atmosphere. These are all posts that regularly appear on my Facebook feed.

For most young people in the Church (and I’d argue that to some extent this extends to Facebook users in general) the Friday and Saturday night parties, the at-fault fender-benders, the loss of temper and ensuing fountain of argumentative and hurtful words directed at a friend, sibling, or significant other, the messier times in life, these surely don’t show up on the Facebook wall. Why not? Because as Facebook posters, we know the potential audience that lies within our online community: parents, teachers, pastors, and employers. It is a highly self-regulated environment.

Instagram is a hotbed of “perfect” pictures. Each one is carefully selected for its attractiveness and then highly edited or filtered to make it look better than reality. In the case wherein someone posts a picture that happened to turn out as post-worthy without editing, the user, as if by some unspoken requirement, will often post “#nofilter” along with the image to ensure the audience is properly enthralled by the sheer perfection of the image in question. Only the best pictures go up, because they can gather the most “likes.”

The regulation of social media breaks down slightly as the audience narrows. Twitter hosts its fair share of heated arguments and troubling posts, yet these still remain cultivated. There are plenty of horror stories recounting involuntary terminations of employment due to ill-conceived or unregulated Tweets. Such stories serve as a warning to the rest of the Twittersphere and the world of Tweeters remain more careful of their future Tweets.

Of all the social media platforms, Snapchat stories show the most authentic view of an individual’s life. Yet even Snapchat allows the user to regulate “real” life. It’s only as real to others as what the user chooses to share.

I believe that this constant, and often subconscious, regulation of our personal image seeps over into real-life interaction and communication. We are highly guarded at all times. On a cultural level, we have lost the ability to participate in real talk. We are not communicating authentically in our everyday lives and it is easy to carry the same guarded, regulated, and cultivated communication into church on Sabbath.

What young people are seeking is a Jesus-centered life. They often don’t know it because it is masked by more of the same brief, surface-level communication. It is all just noise and it gets in the way of Jesus. In church, we do not need to focus on the programming, on the production, or necessarily on scripted events. “The days of the light and fog machines and overly produced church services are a gone era,” says Tony Ranvestel, lead pastor at Clear River Church in Lafayette, Indiana, located near Purdue University. Young people are surrounded by advertising 24/7. They view advertisements and advertise themselves nonstop and none of it feels real. When it comes to church, we’re often striving to produce something flashy and attractive for the young people.

It will never work. Young people crave what they are missing. I strongly believe that we must simplify our approach to ministry and strive to communicate authenticity. It is imperative that young people come to view the Church as a place where they can make and develop open, authentic, and Jesus-centered connections with their peers and community leaders. In youth and young adult ministry, this may take place in a small group, a weekend campout, an open gym night, an evening playing board games, time spent rock crawling and mountain biking on the Western Slope, or at a ski retreat. In our Sabbath schools and church services, it will take place as we dive into and explore tough questions.

We must not be afraid to share our passions, our convictions, and most importantly, our struggles. Young people want to follow authentic leaders who are not afraid to communicate their low points along with the Facebook- worthy moments. They want to worship in an environment that supports the journey; they want to experience real talk.

Kiefer Dooley is RMC assistant youth director.

By Eric Nelson

A Denver metro area series of evangelistic meetings called Revelation Speaks Peace is planned for spring of 2018 with Voice of Prophecy (VOP) speaker and director Shawn Boonstra.

On September 19, seventeen pastors within the Denver area met with the VOP team to begin preparations for this mega event. It is a challenge to determine how to maximize the impact and benefit of the series. In order for this to be successful, advance planning is a must.

The purpose and goal of the outreach is to present Christ and His message. This event is not about a specific ministry such as VOP. Men and women will make eternal decisions that will radically transform their lives. It is all about introducing them to Jesus and His desire for their lives.

Churches and pastors that typically work independently in their own neighborhoods will be cooperating in a greater way. We envision that as we engage together, conference personnel, pastors, and laity will also experience personal spiritual growth. It is not enough to create plans and organize, spend funds and make preparation. It is not enough to find an attractive venue to invite people to. It is not enough to just say, “We will pray about this and for it.” Success will not happen unless the Lord directs, empowers and blesses this effort.

While specific plans are still being made as to the exact dates and location, here is a broad outline of what is being planned. Churches should make plans in the year and months preceding the crusade to hold community events such as health expositions, cooking schools and other community interest events. They may also organize a Discover Bible School within the church. Bible lessons and training materials will be provided for this outreach.

Direct participation will be needed by all of us to lead out in Bible study schools. Other activities will include a prayer ministry. Responding to specific needs during the meetings, additional activities will include child care, special music, translation, greeter services, registration staff, and traffic assistants.

On May 20, 2017, at 3pm, a rally will be held for all RMC church members to come together for a musical con- cert followed by a presentation by Shawn Boonstra. A prayer ministry will be launched at this meeting. We anticipate this being a time to unite as we prepare for the upcoming event. Early in 2018, VOP will hold an archeology seminar designed to gather and cultivate those interests that local churches have developed in preparation for the Denver outreach.

When these plans were shared at a recent RMC Executive Committee, members from outside the Denver area asked this insightful question: “How can we be involved or benefit from these meetings?” While we will not be able to have a VOP speaker at each region of the conference, we can work together to train and prepare for each evangelistic outreach elsewhere within our conference. Other churches can use similar methods in preparation for their hometown meetings as well. We can learn from the provided training and share that with other areas of our conference. We can explore other ways to share messages presented by Shawn Boonstra as it becomes possible to do so. Most of all, we can pray for each other, whether the evangelistic outreach is in Denver or Casper, Farmington, Palisade, or Pueblo. By lifting each other up as we make ourselves available as a tool to reach people for Christ, we strengthen our resolve to work in unity.

As a part of the preparation within the Denver community, Mark Finley, assistant to the President of the General Conference and former speaker for It Is Written, plans to conduct a health outreach seminar (September 15-23, 2017). Presentations will engage participants in learning how to reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer, make positive life choices, develop a personal health strategy, prepare tasty plant based dishes, and increase energy and reduce fatigue.

Eric Nelson is RMC vice president of administration.

By Sandy Hodgson

“True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study. It means more than a preparation for the life that now is. It has to do with the whole being, and with the whole period of existence possible to man. It is the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers. It prepares the student for the joy of service in this world and for the higher joy of wider service in the world to come.” —Ellen G. White, Education, p. 13.

It was my freshman year at Union College as an education major when I was asked to present a worship thought for education leaders within the Mid-America Union who had come together for meetings. I believed then that education had to be equally balanced between academic, physical, social, and spiritual development.

My object lesson was simple and even though I was scared, I was passionate about what I believed. Almost 35 years have gone by since that presentation and God continues to allow me to teach and be taught by His children.

One year after graduating from Union College with a BS in elementary education, my husband and I were on a plane headed to Italy as missionaries with Adventist World Radio. While I accepted the fact that my career in education would have to be put on hold, God had other plans.

My enthusiasm and passion to teach couldn’t be suppressed and despite my inadequacies with the language, I became involved with our local church in helping to organize the Sabbath School departments and Vacation Bible Schools, and serving as youth director. We served Adventist World Radio and our local church community overseas in Italy and Germany for 10 years in total.

Eleven years later and with three children of our own, we were back in the United States and I enrolled in classes at the University of Colorado to update my teaching credentials. Initially I did substitute teaching then moved to part- time teaching, and eventually to full-time teaching in 2004 at Vista Ridge Academy in the Rocky Mountain Conference.

The education department has challenged teachers across the Rocky Mountain Conference to be united in our core values where we have made Christ-centered living foundational for our other values of honor, exploration, responsibility, integrity, service, and heroism. Watching middle school students stop and help another student in need instead of ignoring them or laughing denotes their incorporation of the values of service and honor. How rewarding it is to hear a kindergartener stand up and let their voice be heard when someone is making a wrong choice because they learned how to be courageous in morning meeting!

These core values are strengthened when we become partners with parents. Through open communication, we better understand our common goal of helping our students develop their God-given talents. Parents and teachers who work together can support, encourage, and challenge more effectively.

As educators, we are compelled to see our students grow with a God-given ability to become thinking and responsible individuals, and we are challenged to help them to be who they already are.

In the words of Ellen G. White, “Every human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator—individuality, power to think and to do. . . . It is the work of true education to develop this power, to train the youth to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other men’s thought. Instead of confining their study to that which men have said or written, let students be directed to the sources of truth, to the vast fields opened for research in nature and revelation. Let them contemplate the great facts of duty and destiny, and the mind will expand and strengthen” (Education, p. 17).

It is a privilege to be part of the greatest educational system in the world. That’s what I believe. Recognizing that the original purpose of establishing Seventh-day Adventist schools was to prepare pastoral and medical missionaries to serve around the world, I believe it is still our mission today to prepare young people to be leaders and servants within our local communities and across the globe. The church’s educational system is a worldwide organization that strives for excellence. At times we find ourselves inadequate and flawed, but our vision and determination to equip young people for “the whole period of existence possible to man” confirms our purpose on our journey to excellence.

True education has to be equally balanced between academic, physical, social, and spiritual development. As a Seventh-day Adventist teacher, it is an honor to uphold the trust that parents have placed in me and in our institution to provide the best for their child. I am reminded daily that, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Helping young people recognize the power available to them through Christ to become all that they were created to be continues to be an incredible journey—a journey to excellence.

Sandy Hodgson is principal and teacher at Vista Ridge Academy in Erie, Colorado. www.vistaridge.org

By Carol Bolden

Born in Mexico, Miguel Weckman came to the United States with his parents when he was three years old. The intervening years saw him living in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado (Denver), and Mexico again.

Returning to the United States after his last stint in Mexico was a challenge. “Mexico is like a third-world country,” he explains. “It was difficult to adapt.” He had to adjust to a second language again and the schools he’d attended held varying levels of scholastic standards. Add to that the three months he spent out of school, recuperating from a vehicle accident and it becomes easier to understand his frustration. “But I tried hard!” he exclaims.

In Denver, Miguel was attending the KIPP Denver Collegiate High School, a tuition-free, college-preparatory public charter high school in Southwest Denver, ranked 1 of 43 high schools in the Denver public schools, when his cousin, Julio Chavez, a 2016 graduate of Mile High Academy, told him he should try to get into MHA.

Miguel is a fourth-generation Adventist, so he knew about Mile High Academy, but had never considered attending. Besides, he didn’t have the money for such a venture, but something clicked all the same and he determined he would do whatever it took to go there.

“I see things as reachable always,” Miguel says as a way of explaining why he spent his summer earning money to go to school instead of, like many teenagers, earning money to buy a car.

Working for a landscaping company, he put in 60-hour weeks hauling wheelbarrows full of sand, planting and cutting grass, and beautifying landscapes. Making $12 an hour, he was able to amass enough money to pay his registration fees and first month of tuition at MHA. “My mom always told me to trust God,” Miguel explains. “She told me to be a good boy and to be respectful.”

His soft-spoken greeting and friendly handshake when we met told me that he has listened well to his mother’s admonitions.

The hard work for Miguel isn’t over yet. His school days begin at 9:30 a.m. and finish at 3:30 p.m. Then he practices with Mile High’s soccer team from 4-6 p.m. and is looking for a new job to fill the rest of his evenings. He thinks five hours a day should about do it.

He has heard that Denver’s Porter Hospital hires young people to serve food to patients and that’s the job he’s going for.

“I’m a ‘dream big’ type of guy,” Miguel explains when asked about his plans for the future. “I’ll try to get into Andrews University, study business, go into real estate for a few years, make money and build up from there.”

In an essay he wrote, a philosophy of life of sorts, Miguel says, “Remember to put God in first place because he is the one driving you to success, but don’t leave him all the work, don’t sit down because success is no accident, it is hard work, studying, learning, sacrifice, and most of all love and respect to the people around you.”

Carol Bolden provides administrative support for the RMC communication department.

By Rick Mautz

The mid-October 2016 health summit in Breckenridge, Colorado, was aimed toward making a difference in our communities by addressing the growing epidemic of diabetes. Something must be done and we, as believers, can make a positive impact on this devastating condition that plagues too many unnecessarily.

Many summit participants were surprised to learn that Alzheimer’s disease is closely related to diabetes. Both have as their main culprit insulin resistance. We see Alzheimer’s disease as a feared condition that we can do nothing about except wait and pray that it doesn’t happen to us. However, recent research shows that there is something we can do to improve our chances of warding off both conditions.

The main presenter at the Breckenridge event was Wes Youngberg, author of Goodbye Diabetes, Hello Healthy and his most recent diabetes reversal program Diabetes Undone. The main take-home message was hope! Whether you have type II diabetes (T2D) or you want to prevent it, there is much you can do. When you address the insulin resistance for T2D, and Alzheimer’s, you will be reducing the risk of heart disease, cancer, and many other degenerative diseases as well.

So how do you get started? One of the simplest habits to add to your lifestyle is a short walk after each meal. All participants did that at the summit. For every minute that you walk, your blood sugar drops 1-3 points, a very positive action to control your blood sugar levels. After a 20-minute walk, you will have cut your blood sugars by between 20 and 60 points. This works best if done immediately after eating a meal. This simple lifestyle choice can often bring you back to a safe blood sugar level. If you are resistant to making a change in your diet, consider adding a regular walk. This will give you a big boost toward better health. You may start feeling so much better that other positive habits will be ignited and bring about better health.

Research is beginning to show that just controlling blood sugar levels with medication may not reduce the health risks that come with diabetes. Simply treating the symptom (the blood sugar levels) does nothing to treat the disease itself. Addressing the cause of the disease, the insulin resistance, can only be achieved by lifestyle changes.

Another presenter in the field of dietetics was Brenda Davis, RD, recognized as one of the top dietitians in the field of plant-based nutrition. She explained how to avoid inflammation and oxidative stress through proper diet. Refining of foods can turn normally nutritious foods into disease producers. Her recommendation was to choose foods as close to their original form as possible.

Simply receiving information on the topic will probably not bring about the desired results. We need a helper to pull off an effective lifestyle change. The second focus of the summit, therefore, was teaching how to provide personal ongoing support or coaching for those wanting to make lifestyle changes.

Summit participants caught on to this need and reacted with enthusiasm about learning through the online coaching programs available through the RMC health ministry office. The training aims to provide health partners to people who attend future health programs in local churches and in the community.

For more information you can check our website: rmcsda.org/health.

Rick Mautz is RMC health director.

By Rajmund Dabrowski

I was catapulted into this piece after a daydream during some unexpected cold weather that kept me inside. My deep connection with nature and enchantment with the seasons that unveil nature’s beauty were the inspiration.

I imagined a permanent year morphing all four seasons into each other.

What if the purple lavender of summer in Provence seamlessly shared the colors and the scent of the purple autumn bell heathers in Hampshire’s heathlands in England? Being born in the month of September, it’s the heathers that appeal most to my senses.

Then, my daydream morphed to the colors of golden autumn trees in Poland, Canada, and New England, as they give themselves up for the wintery whiteness and abundance of snow in front of our house in Maryland.

Soon the snow would join the warming sunrays of spring, with an array of green hope covering the flora.

Such daydreaming is my reaction to what many of us experience as a loss of what once was predictable—the golden past. Instead, the predictability of global warming, and with it the decaying nature of our Mother Earth.

In A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway describes the sadness “of losing a season out of your life” when unseasonal changes in the weather destroy the expected warmth of spring. “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally; but it was frightening that it had nearly failed,” he wrote, reflecting on his Paris days in the 1920s.

As I recall the “good old days” of my distant past, gone are the farmers gazing at the evening sky and knowing for certain what would come in the morning.

We are left with a daydream.

Then came an actual dream. While I daydream in full color, my night dreams are checkered with some color, but all too often consist of black-and-white scenes. This includes scary nightmares with vivid experiences of fear. I’m always running in those bouts of night-imagination.

This time, I saw images of heaven. The images were inspired by Scriptural narratives. Whether I was there, or not I cannot tell for certain. What I saw etched itself in my memory to be recalled again and again.

An uncounted multitude walked on heavenly boulevards. Everything was bathed in sunshine and formed a palette of rainbow colors.

On closer scrutiny, I recognized some faces. Ha! I heard myself utter. Did they deserve to be there? I mused. I would not have expected to see some of them enjoying this celestial bliss.

Oh, really?

Upon reflection, it became clear that not all is as simple and true in life as we assume or conclude.

Whether you dream at night or daydream in the afternoon about a better reality, all you can do is look after your own rights or wrongs. The rest—everything else, actually—belongs to the Life Giver.

Rajmund Dabrowski is RMC communication director and editor of Mountain Views.