Chapter 6: Dream Big
This chapter starts off talking about plans for the future, about our 5 year and 10 year plans and, well, I don’t have one, I have never had one. I was certain from the first time I read Little Women at about age 14 that I was Beth and that I would never live to see adulthood. So growing up I didn’t plan for a future because I just knew that I would never live to see it. Then as the years went by, college passed, the 20s then the 30s and now moving through the 40s, I still held on to the belief that my life was simply a transition and had no substance or real meaning because I was not supposed to live very long. I was waiting to die. My 10 year plan would have had to include an expiration date if I had ever written one. Then the heart attack and God didn’t let me die. At the most logical moment and time and place, due to my own poor choices in living, where I SHOULD have died, God stepped in and said no. I have never planned for the future because I never intended to be here, God has always intended me to be here and His will supersedes my own.
Somehow, as a child, I got a perception in my head that I would die, it was the only thing that made sense of the utter loneliness and sadness I seemed to suffer from relentlessly. It was a promise that the life that was so heartbreakingly sad would end and would no longer have to face another empty lonely day. I honestly couldn’t wait. Oh, I also hoped for the Cinderella story, but I honestly deep in my heart never believed it would happen and therefore I waited impatiently for death. God however, had other plans.
Then the book asks, does your 10 year plan capture your dreams? Is that what I want to do with my life?
Then Dr. P talks about how making herself write down her dreams is the catalyst that actually powered her toward fulfilling some of those dreams. She says that dreams are what expand our abilities to make a difference.
She also addressed the question of weather a woman already in her 40s can dream a big dream when half her life is already over and she has had to sacrifice some of them already to get where she is. (That hit me hard). Then she told a story that hit me harder. A story about a woman who was expecting to get out of high school, get married, and raise a family in a little yellow how with a garden and lots of flowers. However, the years passed by as she waited for that right man to come and start her dream. Each year on her birthday, her heart broke a little more and life appeared a little less bright until she felt trapped in an endless life with no hope of escaping. Then one day her best friend took her to show her a house for sale, a little yellow house and the friend bought her flowers and garden seeds on the day she moved in after bidding for and buying the house. The woman, with the encouragement and help (not just words but actions) of her friend began to realize her dream without waiting for the man to show up. As the next few years progressed, the woman began to make friends around her neighborhood and they all started a small garden shop together. One of her neighbors, a very shy man, two years younger than her, also loved to garden and the two have become very close, close enough that the woman’s dreams may someday all be fulfilled, just not in the order she had set them up. In the process of making some of her dreams come true, she is finding all of her dreams. It is in the pursuit of our dreams that we stop being half a person, waiting in the wings for things to happen, to being the whole person we were meant to be.
Now, what are my dreams? What do I aspire to be or do? What yearning and passion has God placed in my heart? What do I dream about?
We are designed to love and our love is expanded through our dreams. Dreams are the touchstone of our character wrote one poet and if our truest lives awake when we dare to dream, then we need to dream big.
Chapter 7: Back to the Sea Glass
No matter where we are on this planet, each of us, as a believer has been created and called to make a mark, a difference. And the greatest difference we can make is to show others who God is. In fact scripture says that each person is giving something to do that shows who God is (1Cor 12:7).
Now, how do I find my “something?” This is where we get bogged down in the thinking of the something as having to be a difference making cosmic quest to find the way in which God wishes me to make a difference. How do I find MY PATH? But the truth is, the path is within our very being, it is not an external cosmic quest but a lifetime of making choices within the path we were given to walk. Not looking for a “great” and “profound” road less traveled, but only looking for the right road for our everyday choices.
The cosmic answer, for EVERYONE, is LOVE. God sent us to show His LOVE. That is it. No great revelation, no journey into the jungles of Africa necessarily, no living on the streets, just showing the world around us in the life we live daily, God’ LOVE. THAT is how we make our mark. We make our mark, when we resist snubbing that person who deserves it, when we choose to forgive a slight instead of hold a grudge, when we encourage those who are disheartened, when we express our insecurities to a friend who thinks we are strong, or return an empty shopping cart to the proper place instead of leaving it where it stops.
Love, love, love this… You do not have to be living in a place of prominence, you don’t have to live in a certain area, you don’t have to acquire qualities you do not already possess, and you do not have to be “well spoken” or even “put together”, and best of all you do not have to be living the perfect life. In point of fact, it is our pain and our brokenness that may be vital for how some of us are designed to make our unique differences.
We are all aware that we are each an original, what confronts us often though is the concept that “our” original is a “good “ thing. Far to often we compare ourselves to others around us and that traps us into unproductive thinking of being worse or even better than another when the truth is that we are just different and created different for a different purpose and path.
Not all our gifts are listed on the “traditional” list of gifts, yet they are specifically gifted to us. Just because we see our gifts as normal or not unusual in any way, does not mean that they are not special and unique and desperately needed. All too often we wave a compliment off saying “everybody can do that,” when in fact, everybody cannot.
Our purpose is about love, but just as importantly it is about the unique way we were created to love. No piece of sea glass in a collection is exactly the same yet it takes the whole collection to produce the spectacular result of color and beauty.
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