Personal Testimony - Dreams that Die

You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams.  A lot of things that I wanted to do.  We all have dreams.  Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage.  Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world.  Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been. 

And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams.  You tweak them.  You roll them over in your head.  You begin to adjust them ‘here and there’ to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands.  And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work.  How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off.  It’s a really neat kind of thing. 

And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you’ve had those kinds of dreams as well.  That you’ve played with some really cool ideas.  That there was something that you were excited about, that gave you some sort of energy or sense of excitement.  That you had some sort of vision for your life that added something to your life that you needed. 

But then life happens.  In whatever way it happens, it happens.  It happens to all of us.  And many times, whatever happens ends up killing those dreams.  They die.  They just die.  Sometimes they die before they were ever born, or sometimes the dream is actually beginning to unfold and then it dies.  However or whenever it happens, they die. 

And sometimes we try to bring them back, or resurrect them in whatever way that we try to do that.  We try to figure out how to do them differently, or modify them, or come at them from a different angle.  Or we decide to fight the thing that’s killed our dreams.  We figure that if we can eliminate whatever killed our dreams, (or at least beat it up pretty thoroughly), that maybe, just maybe, we can get our dream back.

At other times we just let our dreams die.  We either don’t know what to do, or we’re overwhelmed, or we can’t get past a sense of injustice or unfairness, or whatever it is.  And because we let it die (because we feel that we have no other option but to let it die) we refuse to ever dream again because the death of a dream is just too painful.  It’s just too much.

The world will kill our dreams.  Life has no qualms about showing up and killing the very things that we spent a large part of our lives living for.  Dreams die every day.  They die at the hands of whole bunch of stuff.  And for every dream that dies, something on the inside of the person dies as well.  The death of a dream is just too painful because a part of us dies right along with it.

I’ve had many dreams die.  So have you.  And every time one died, something inside of us died too.  But when my dreams died, here’s I’ve found.  I learned that God has a dream for each of us that will never die.  Never.  It’s just too big to die, it’s place in God’s plan is just too important to let it die, and it’s backed up by a God who never dies. 

There are many who would not agree with me.  And that’s okay.  However, I believe that God has a dream for your life that’s bigger than any dream that you could conjure up.  God’s dream for you exceeds anything that you could dream for you.  So, ask Him what it is.  Talk to a pastor.  Get into your Bible and start reading.  If you don’t have one, buy one, or download a Bible app.  Listen to Christian music.  Find a church.  God can and will use any or all of these to help you discover the dream that you were fashioned to live out.  And that dream won’t die.