It was the stuff that dreams are made of. A seventeen year old girl in Inglewood, California wrote a letter to her favorite television star. Enclosed was a newspaper clipping accompanied by a picture. The article told about a show the girl was to appear in. In the newspaper article the writer noted what this girl's friends had already told her many times before the girl's physical resemblance to the television star. A few days later the girl's phone rang. It was the television star. "Don't say anything about it to anyone," she said, "I don't want anyone to recognize me. But I plan to see your show. Afterwards we will talk about your career." The young girl was speechless. "My career?" she thought. "I am only 17." The television star? You may have already guessed it--Carol Burnett. The teenage girl, Vicki Lawrence, became a star in her own right.

The stuff that dreams are made of. We all have our dreams, don't we? Our lives have a way of getting dull, flat, uninspired. We fantasize about romance. Did you know that people in love have less colds, by the way? That's true, according to Dr. Joyce Brothers. Being in love is good for us--mind, body and spirit.

We fantasize about money even though deep in our hearts we know that it can't buy happiness.

We remember Little Chap in the musical, "Stop the World I Want to Get Off!" Little Chap is driven by a fantastic ambition to become rich and famous. Finally he succeeds in making a million dollars, and proud, prosperous and successful, he sings, "For once in my lifetime, I feel like a giant, I soar like an eagle as though I had wings..."

Then Little Chap becomes even more wealthy. He makes additional millions. He is elected to parliament, is knighted by the queen, receives the highest honors. He has a series of love affairs. but they are meaningless, for he loves only himself.

Toward the end of the play, we see him as an old, bitter, cynical man who sings, "What kind of fool am I?...an empty shell, a lonely cell in which a lonely heart must dwell..."

We know money won't buy happiness, but still we dream. We dream that something life-changing will happen to us, that a handsome knight will come riding in on a great white horse to swoop us up in his arms, or that our boat will finally make it to the dock. We long for life to take on new meaning, new purpose, new direction, new excitement. We feel like we've missed something somehow. We identify with the old lady who was celebrating her one hundredth birthday. She sat rocking on her front porch, her glasses perched on her nose.

"Grandma," said one of the visiting kin, "you must have seen a lot in the last hundred years."

"Not much," snapped the old lady. "Everything was always over by the time I could find these durn glasses!"

In an article in the "Saturday Review," Ann Landers tells what she has learned about people through the letters she has received. "Since I began writing this column," she writes, "I've learned plenty, including, most meaningfully, what Leo Rosten had in mind when he said, ˜Each of us us a little lonely, deep inside, and cries to be understood.' I have learned how it is with the stumbling, tortured people in this world who have nobody to talk to. The fact that the column has been a success underscores, for me at least, the central tragedy of our society, the disconnectedness, the insecurity, the fear that bedevils, cripples, and paralyzes so many of us. I have learned that financial success, academic achievement, and social or political status open no doors to peace of mind or inner security. We are all wanderers, like sheep, on this planet."1

A Harvard scholar, Harlow Shapley, made up a list of "possible causes of the destruction of civilization." On this list he included nuclear war, natural catastrophe, and widespread disease. Ranked third on this list is boredom!

Many are the persons who can say with Hamlet:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Is there any hope for us--those of us who live dull, listless lives longing for something, anything, that can give meaning, color, purpose to the lives we live?

The Biblical answer is: yes, of course there is. This is the deeper meaning of the miracle in John's Gospel of Jesus turning the water into wine. The setting is a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee. The wine is running low. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was concerned about the embarrassment this would cause. She spoke to Jesus about it. Nearby were six stone jars reserved for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. "Fill the jars with water," Jesus told the servants. They were filled to the brim. "Now draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water now become wine, he exclaimed to the bridegroom, "Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine, but you have kept the good wine until now."

Such is the change that Christ can make water to wine from dull, flat, colorless, tasteless to rich, rewarding, exciting, challenging. Doctors tell us that water is good for us--we need eight glasses each day. But most of us don't prefer simple drinking water. We want something more and Jesus offers something more. That is the deeper meaning in this miracle--it is the change that Christ can make in a person's life.

He can give us a change of MENTAL ATTITUDE. C.S. Lewis,in his book, THE GREAT DIVORCE, gives us a description of the geography, landscape, and strategy of heaven and hell. More importantly, he makes us aware that hell is a place people choose, not a place to which they are sent. Think about that for a moment. Your life can be heaven or it can be hell, and you can choose.

Victor Frankl was imprisoned, stripped, beaten, starved and deprived in every way in Hitler's death camps. But one thing he said could not be taken away from him was the ability to choose how he would respond to his situation.

You can choose. You do not have to let life defeat you. You can go through hell on the outside and have a bit of heaven on the inside. Christ can do that for you if you will let him.

He can give you a new mental attitude. He can also give you a NEW MISSION FOR YOUR LIFE. Eric Hoffer in THE TRUE BELIEVER writes, "When people are bored it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored."

The most important change we can make in our lives is to move from maintenance to mission. Halford Luccock once told about a young woman named Anne Walter Fearn who went to China many years ago as a medical missionary. Her mother was terribly anxious about Anne's safety on the trip out to China. She gave the girl a twenty-dollar gold piece with which to send back one word by cable on her landing, the word "safe." The young missionary spent the money for a cablegram, but she did not send the word "safe." She sent another one-word cable: "Delighted." The word "delighted" is far more jubilant and a far more Christian word than "safe."2

Many people spend their lives being merely safe. No delight or joy fills their lives because they live only for themselves. They have never understood Jesus' words that in order to save our lives we must lose them. From maintenance to mission--that is a key step in turning the water of our lives to wine.

Another is a NEW MOTIVATION. Ulysses S. Grant had a famous weakness for drink. A biographer of Grant wrote that "fondness of drink seemed to stay with him, although it is notable that he never indulged it when the chips were down. His benders always took place in dull periods, when nothing much was going on." Did you catch that? WHEN NOTHING MUCH WAS GOING ON.

It is hard to imagine a follower of Jesus Christ finding a time when nothing much is going on. Indeed, most of us are much more likely to complain that there is too much to do and too little time to do it.

Contrast Grant's situation with that of a rich and popular Italian youth named Giovanni. Giovanni was the life of the party. Indeed, his friends once crowned him, "King of Revellers." But suddenly something happened to this young man to change his life. Giovanni Francesco Bernadone became the gently and compassionate St. Francis of Assisi. From a life of dissolution, Francis moved to a life of discipleship. He had a new motivation for life. Christ had changed the water of his life to wine.

A new mental attitude, a new mission, and a new motivation. But most of all, Christ gives us a NEW MEASURE OF OUR WORTH AS HUMAN BEINGS. Tom Skinner, the gifted black president of Associates, Inc., of New York City, spoke at a prayer breakfast several years ago in Des Moines, Iowa. He described a survey of 50,000 suicides in New York City during the previous year. "Their average income was $37,000 per year," noted Skinner. "One ought to be able to get by on that! Why these suicides?" he asked. Then he looked at the expanded problem. "Why are there 10,000,000 alcoholics, with 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 children and youth included, mostly from the upper middle class, most of them with college degrees? Why?" His answer: "They do not know who they are! For they have never been loved truly so as to believe in their own cosmic significance and therefore their worth!"3

Many of you know the name Dean Jones. Dean Jones has starred in many of the most popular Walt Disney movies. This is the testimony Dean Jones gives: "I was performing in summer stock at a New Jersey lodge and had gone to my room to be alone. Nothing was satisfying me. I looked out of the window and felt fear and confusion. Impulsively, I knelt by the bed and spelled out my doubts to God; I don't know why I was moved to do this. I said to God, ˜If you bring meaning to my life, I will serve you.'" God did bring meaning into Dean Jones' life. Suddenly he knew who he was--a child of the King.

Dallas Cowboy football coach Tom Landry made that same discovery back in 1958. As he put it,..."I became...a person with goals beyond winning and losing football games...." Jesus Christ made that change in Tom Landry's life. A new mental attitude, a new mission, a new motivation, and a new measure of our own self-worth. He can take a dull, colorless drab existence and turn it into an exciting, meaningful, and purposeful adventure. "I have come," he said, "that they might have life and have it more abundantly." He can change water into wine.

1. David Rogne

2. Halford E. Luccock, 365 WINDOWS (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1955).

3. Lance Webb, MAKING LOVE GROW (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1983)