And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:19)
I’ve started re-reading Living With Your Dreams by David Seamands. It’s a difficult book for me to read because it has seemed to me for a long time that my dreams … well, let’s put it as bluntly as the lie that I believed. It has seemed to me that if I dreamed of it, that it was the last thing God could allow to happen. It wasn’t that God is mean, it was that there was something very wrong with me, something that made it impossible for me to do anything other than ruin everything I touched. If He’d given me my dreams, I’d have ruined them.
And the reality is that we do tend to ruin our dreams. If we’re wise, we ruin them in little ways. If we’re foolish, we ruin them spectacularly. I can’t help but think of the celebrities who have committed suicide. I know mental illness is often involved, but I suspect there is also disappointment that the dream that they held in their hands either wasn’t what they imagined or wasn’t enough, or that they had somehow ruined them.
So now we come to a time when I have decisions to make. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” has become “What am I going to do now?” For the past four years, I’ve had the chance to build a dream I’d abandoned after college: writing. Todays’ chapter in the book dealt with the fact that Joseph’s dreams needed to be tempered. He didn’t have the dream and two weeks later, it all happened, and everyone lived happily ever after. Instead, he was sold into slavery by the very people he dreamed would bow to him. He had to grow into the dream.
Over the past month, I’ve been struggling with my dream of writing. Part of it is dealing with the business of life. Part of it was moving. Part of it was and is the choice I made to move my writing into my living room. Big changes, little changes, their stresses have been taking their toll. It's only in the last few days that I've started to feel as though I am back on track.
Somewhere along the way in the past few days, I’ve reached the level of settledness in which I can compartmentalize again. I set a goal of spending two hours a day writing for a group I’m in and put it in my calendar. I’ve set some limits on some other things, so I have some room for my dreams again. And now, perhaps, I am finally ready for them.
And the reality is that we do tend to ruin our dreams. If we’re wise, we ruin them in little ways. If we’re foolish, we ruin them spectacularly. I can’t help but think of the celebrities who have committed suicide. I know mental illness is often involved, but I suspect there is also disappointment that the dream that they held in their hands either wasn’t what they imagined or wasn’t enough, or that they had somehow ruined them.
So now we come to a time when I have decisions to make. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” has become “What am I going to do now?” For the past four years, I’ve had the chance to build a dream I’d abandoned after college: writing. Todays’ chapter in the book dealt with the fact that Joseph’s dreams needed to be tempered. He didn’t have the dream and two weeks later, it all happened, and everyone lived happily ever after. Instead, he was sold into slavery by the very people he dreamed would bow to him. He had to grow into the dream.
Over the past month, I’ve been struggling with my dream of writing. Part of it is dealing with the business of life. Part of it was moving. Part of it was and is the choice I made to move my writing into my living room. Big changes, little changes, their stresses have been taking their toll. It's only in the last few days that I've started to feel as though I am back on track.
Somewhere along the way in the past few days, I’ve reached the level of settledness in which I can compartmentalize again. I set a goal of spending two hours a day writing for a group I’m in and put it in my calendar. I’ve set some limits on some other things, so I have some room for my dreams again. And now, perhaps, I am finally ready for them.
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