Ghost Taffy

The other night I had this dream where I lived out a whole day knowing that I was going to die very soon. I visited my dying mother (fictional Mom obviously since my real Mom has already died), mended broken relationships, and spend the day of my dream in a reflective state. Then I returned home in the evening. I walked into a room with a table filled with stuff in bags and boxes. Suddenly a feeling came over me that today was the day I would die. I immediately called Alicia.

"This is really going to happen," is all I said.

Immediately, she was with me hugging me from behind. The flood of emotion came though and in the midst of that, I saw on the table in a bag a bunch of left over halloween themed taffy. I love sweets and if something good is placed before me and I have any room in my stomach, I'll eat it. So I reached out to grab a ghost taffy.

Then I realized how unimportant this taffy was. I realized that I didn't really need it. In the midst of thinking of so many weighty matters, I was suddenly uninterested in this impulse. My hand stopped over the bag and retracted. Then I woke up.

Obviously the whole dream was emotional but the part that stuck with me was the taffy.  I was dying within hours, my wife was hugging me and needed a great amount of comforting and still my vision and focus was on a small piece of taffy.

As I tossed in bed for the next hour, I remembered a talk given in Church last Sunday. The speaker talked about putting eternal matters first and everything else in life (all the ghost taffy in the world) will find it's proper place. When I got out of bed, I decided to live the day as if it were my last and see what kind of ghost taffy I could avoid. As a result, I spent much of the day with people, my sister at her divorce mediation, the people on my team in talking to them about their work and coaching on issue resolution, playing with my kids, and then spending time talking with Alicia. It would have made a great last day on earth but, luckily, it wasn't.