Living the Dream: Building an Extraordinary Life Through Christianity

By Blaine Locklair

You are special and unique. You deserve to have the best possible life you can live. There is so much available to you in the world to make your life even greater than it is today. But how do you get it? How do you get from where you are today to where you deserve to be tomorrow? Christianity has taught the ways to make life extraordinary, and this book will help you learn what Christianity can do to add value to your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359113750

Book preview

Living the Dream: Building an Extraordinary Life Through Christianity

Living The Dream: Building An Extraordinary Life Through Christianity

First Edition

ISBN # 978-0-359-11375-0

Copyright © 2018 Blaine Locklair Ministries

All rights reserved.

Original Source: Living The Dream: Building An Extraordinary Life Through Christianity – by Blaine Locklair

Paperback Edition September 2018 (ISBN: 978-0-359-03807-7)

Electronic Edition – 1.0 – Build 09/24/2018

Original Process: Direct from Digital Source File

Rendered by: Blaine Locklair Ministries

Dedication

This book, as with all my books, is dedicated to my wife, Angie, and my son, Ryan. Angie has been a devoted spouse to me for over 19 years, and every year or our marriage has been more exciting, more passionate, and more fulfilling than the last. In short, I married up. My son, Ryan, is now 13 years old, and one of the most virtuous, principled, compassionate, and intelligent people I’ve ever known. He never ceases to amaze me with his belief in traditional Christian values, openness to learning, and his devotion to family.

This book is also dedicated to my father, Virgil Locklair, who  entered immortality in June 2018. He was an incredible role model, an incredible teacher, an incredible mentor, an incredible husband, an incredible grandparent, and most importantly, an incredible father. He knew to always be a father first and a friend second. He often cited the song That’s My Job by Conway Twitty as his motto. As quoted in the song: Every person carves his spot and fills the hole with light. And I pray someday I might light as bright as he.

Finally, I want to thank my step-mother, Pat Locklair, for being a wonderful wife to my father and a true mother to me for the 35 years they were married. Although she is now a widow, she remains a mother to me and always will.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Donoghue, Jon Rogers, and John Simpson Jr. for helping me copy edit this book. While their work to help me copy edit my books is highly appreciated, their friendship is what I cherish most about them all. They have made my life more intellectual, more successful, and more fun than I could have imagined. As Jack Nicholson told Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, (They) make me want to be a better man. I believe their examples at home, at work, and in the community are ones I can follow to achieve this goal, and I thank them all for being friends, role models, and mentors all in one.

Preface

As a minister, and as a retired police lieutenant, I have seen much of our world. I’ve seen wealth and I’ve seen poverty. I’ve seen health and I’ve seen sickness. I’ve seen joy and I’ve seen sorrow. I’ve seen strength and I’ve seen weakness. I’ve seen life and I’ve seen death. And, perhaps most importantly, I’ve seen hope and I’ve seen hopelessness. There is much hopelessness in our world, and especially in our nation. One of the songs I’ve listened to lately is Alone Again, Naturally by Gilbert O’Sullivan, as covered by Diana Krall and Michael Bublé on her Wallflower album. In the bridge, the lyrics go like this: Seems to me that there are more hearts broken in the world that can’t be mended – left unattended. What do we do? What do we do? People are starving for hope. How bad is this epidemic? Cavett Robert, the founder of the National Speakers Association, of which I am a past member, had this to say: Three billion people on the face of the earth go to bed hungry every night, but four billion people go to bed every night hungry for a simple word of encouragement and recognition. Hope is perhaps our nation’s, and our world’s, greatest need. The giving of hope, through God’s word, is the reason I wrote this book.

So, why the title Living The Dream? It comes from a part of my life where a friend and I used to say it to each other when we’d meet each day. How you doin’ today? Living the dream!, I’d sarcastically reply with a grin. It even evolved into adding in, I’m Man of La Mancha up in here!, a reference to the song The Impossible Dream and the line Dream the impossible dream in it. How off-center was I back then? The website Urban Dictionary defines living the dream as An answer to the rhetorical how's it going?. Usually given when someone at work asks how you are and it is quite obvious that you have a crappy job and are just as broke as the next person. Except that I wasn’t broke. And I didn’t have a crappy job. I had a great job and the material things I wanted. What haughty, thoughtless arrogance on my part. At the time, I was a police detective, working in the most celebrated area of police work one can achieve: CSI – Crime Scene Investigation. How celebrated? I counted all of the American crime television series from from the 2010s from Wikipedia and it totaled 133 shows! I was a 30-something in near-perfect health with a beautiful wife (still married to her, and she’s still beautiful), a fine son, a home, computers, video arcade games and pinball machines in my man cave, and even ownership of America’s Sports Car: a Corvette. And I had the audacity to say living the dream every time I was asked how I was doing.

Then the bottom fell out of it all. In 2009, at the age of four, my son was diagnosed with autism at the Medical University of South Carolina. I remember the day like it was yesterday. What I remember most about it, though was the drive home from MUSC. As my wife cried in the passenger’s seat of the car, and my son rode blissfully in the back seat, I looked at her and said, Don’t worry; he’s still the same child now that he was when we walked in their door. Hope. We both needed it badly, both right at that moment and for the years-long journey ahead. It was that day that I realized the power of hope and how much of it was absent in people’s lives. Now, I would need it in my own life, and the life of my family.

I went to my employer and applied to have my son’s autism needs insured, and was told they would not cover them. I had been there for about six years at the time, and I was crushed. Everything that seemed so important before suddenly seemed meaningless; all I wanted to do was help my son, and I couldn’t. I would have given up everything to have just had the power to give him what he needed to overcome autism. Well, God works in mysterious ways. Not long before my son’s diagnosis, South Carolina had passed a law requiring employers of 50 or more employees that issue group insurance (think: Blue Cross Blue Shield) to pay up to $50,000/yr in coverage for autism-related treatment. I was hired back at my former state policing job, and my son’s needs were covered immediately by insurance. Nine years later, he is now an 8th grader taking advanced courses and making straight As in school. After $200,000 in autism-related therapy, he is now a happy, productive member of society and a well-disciplined student of martial arts (currently an advanced blue belt). He is no longer in special education classes and no longer requires autism-related services.

How does all of this tie in together? It’s because I learned the value – no, the necessity – of hope in everyone’s life. It manifests itself in different ways, but we all need it in some way. I also learned the importance of gratitude. When people ask me how I’m doing now, my answers are Wonderfully well, thank you!, Another great day! and If I was any better, I’d think the deck was stacked! And I really mean it. I don’t own the Vette anymore, I don’t own the video games and pinball machines anymore, and the man cave gets two ordinary cars parked in it. And I couldn’t be happier. Materialism never leads to Living The Dream. Hope does. Gratitude does. Faith in God does. And putting the lives of others ahead of our own does. That’s why the book is called Living