Mr. Chip McGregor tells a great story about a man who turned his dreams into reality. This is a story that needs to be shared with all of you:

I suppose that most people have dreams, but how many people, actually turn their dreams into reality?  Larry Walters is among the relatively few who have.  His story is true, though you may find at hard to believe.

Larry was a truck driver, just an ordinary truck driver, but his lifelong dream was to fly.  When he graduated from high school, he joined the United States Air Force in hopes of becoming a pilot.  Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him.  So when he finally left the service, he had to satisfy himself with watching others fly the fighter jets that crisscrossed the skies over his backyard.  As he sat there in his lawn chair,…he dreamed about the magic of flying.

Then one day, Larry Walters got an idea.  He got up out of his lawn chair, and went down to the army-navy surplus store and bought a tank of helium, and forty-five weather balloons.  These were not your highly colored party balloons, these were heavy duty spheres measuring more than four feet  across when fully inflated.

Back in his own yard, Larry used straps to attach the balloons to his lawn chair, the kind that you might have in your own back yard.  He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep and inflated the balloons with helium.  Then he packed some sandwiches and drinks and loaded a BB gun, figuring he could pop a few of those balloons when it was time to return to earth.

His preparations complete, Larry Walters sat in his chair and cut the anchoring cord.  His plan was to lazily float back down to terra firma.  But things didn’t quite work out that way.

When Larry cut the cord, he didn’t float lazily up; he shot up as if fired from a cannon!  Nor did he go up a couple hundred feet.  He climbed and climbed until he finally leveled off at eleven thousand feet!  At that height, he could hardly risk deflating any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really experience flying!  So he stayed up there, sailing around for fourteen hours, totally at a loss as to how to get down.

Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles International Airport.  A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy sitting in a lawn chair at eleven thousand feet with a gun in his lap.  (Now there’s a conversation I’d have given anything to have heard!)

LAX is right on the ocean, and you may know that at nightfall, the winds on the coast begin to change.  So, as dusk fell, Larry began to drift out to sea.  At that point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter to rescue him.  But the rescue team had a hard time getting to him, because the draft from the propeller kept pushing his home-made contraption farther and farther away.  Eventually the crew were able to hover over him and drop a rescue line with which they gradually hauled him back to earth.

As soon as Larry hit the ground he was arrested.  But as he was being led away in handcuffs, a television reporter yelled out,  “Mr. Walters, why’d you do it?”  Larry stopped, eyed the man, then replied nonchalantly, “A man just can’t sit around.”

Risk is always a significant part of all great achievements.  All success occurs in the fringe of fear.  If you ever plan to turn your own dreams and goals into reality, then you had better be ready to get scared and be willing to put at risk those things in your life that you simply have to do or have to have…

Blessings and Encouragement to You…………..