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When I was younger, I dreamed of making a difference in the world by teaching. There are days when the dream I've entered feels more a nightmare, but here I am anyway!
My musician dreams have similarly unfolded as I've stepped into them. There's the good and the bad there, too.
I dream of paying off my large student loan. Eventually, I *will* whittle it down the old-fashioned way. But in the present, 'tis but a sweet dream that someone will miraculously pay off my student debt for me ;-)
More elusive, longterm dreams include...
...healthy marriage w/an appropriate mixture of happiness, conflict, comfort, goofiness, and grief
...2-3 bio children, a dream that's "going the way of all things" (sorry, Sue...haven't made them permanently non-existent yet, but the dream has been scaled back from 2.5 to 1)
...adobe house w/ocotillo fence w/a baby grand in the middle of it
...boarding a plane someday and returning a short while later with a child to adopt(though maybe it will just involve driving across town)
...writing a book with power to change the world, like "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Grapes of Wrath," or even (more indirectly) "The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe"
...seeing loved ones returning to God, or going to him for the first time
Dreams do have that tendency to pull us back from that self-imposed false Nirvana... Which is both good and bad. Dreams are definitely good in their ability to get us off our couches. On the other hand, when I'm feeling my dreams, it's often frustrating, and when it's frustrating, I remember this Langston Hughes poem, "A Dream Deferred": http://www.cswnet.com/~menamc/langston.htm
I'm trying to figure out how I might give the "heavy load" of my dreams more to God. What does that look like, in terms of concrete behavior/thinking?
OK, I uploaded, but then I thought some more about Langston Hughes. For a more balanced picture, there's another one he wrote, called "Dreams": http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?45442B7C000C04070176 |
