The Golden Mailbox
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Several years ago I had a very unusual dream. In the dream I saw myself as the engineer on a railroad engine. I was sitting on the seat at the edge of the huge locomotive looking down the tracks to make sure all was clear.

In my training as an engineer, they taught us to always depend on the instruments on the instrument panel over what I actually saw down the tracks with my eyes or heard with my ears.

I was sitting there watching the tracks, when suddenly I saw a brick wall across the tracks. I looked at the radar on the instrument panel and it said the tracks were all clear. I looked again and again and there was a very real brick wall across the tracks.

As I looked at the approaching brick wall there was a voice in my head that started crying out to me, "Jump Cordell, Jump or you will be killed". I was very scared and could see the brick wall coming. The voice got louder and louder as the brick wall approached. I was very tempted to jump from the train even though the train was going full speed. I really did not consider the fact that if I jumped from a speeding train I would be killed anyway. The voice in my head just made it sound like the right thing to do.

Each time I looked down the tracks at the approaching brick wall and heard the voice crying out to me to jump, I would look at the instrument panel again and saw that all of the instruments said that the track was clear. I had just a few seconds to decide what to do.

Finally as the train approached the brick wall I decided to follow my training and depend on the instruments rather than what I saw with my eyes or the voice I heard in my head. I just closed my eyes and let the train hit the brick wall at full speed.

I heard a ripping noise and when I opened my eyes the track was all clear and I realized that someone had just put a paper picture of a brick wall across the tracks. It looked very real, but the instruments were correct. The tracks had been clear all along and the voice crying out was wrong. Had I jumped from the train I would surely have been killed. As the dream ended, I was so startled I woke up, because the dream was so real.

I have thought of that dream many times over the years and seen its application in my life over and over. There have been so many times when I knew what to do. I knew what is right. I have been trained to follow the right path and then someone will start calling out to me to not follow what I know is right. They will try to get me to jump from the train of life that I have been trained to follow.

There have been other times that it was not people but just circumstances that arose that tempted me to do things other than what I knew was the right course of life. Sometimes the temptations have been so strong and real that it was all that I could do to resist. But each time that I have followed the inner inspiration and God given intuition within me, I have been able to stay on course and do what was right. Each time, after the circumstances have passed, I have been able to look back and realize that those temptations to not follow what I knew was right were just a false paper picture of a brick wall across my path of life. I could see that if I had gone with the persuasions of those people or followed the temptation of the circumstances into a path where I knew it was not right to go, my life could have be changed forever.

I am grateful for that dream. I am grateful that the God of Heaven loves each of us enough that he would put inside of us His guiding spirit to know what is right and wrong regardless of what religion we belong to or what culture we come from. I am thankful for those divine instruments within us and the knowledge that they are always right. It was best described by Shawn Awan, a dear friend of mine from Pakistan who said, "It is like God put a homing device inside us".

May we each have the courage to follow those instruments that God has put inside us and do what we know is right in every turn of our life. May that be true in our personal life, in our homes and our relationships with our families, in our businesses affairs, and in our relationships within our community.

Your millionaire making friend

Cordell Vail, W.B.