Life and Dreams

I had a way I saw my life going. I prayed about it; dreamed about it; I knew it from girlhood in the same way I knew the lines of my mother's face.
It hasn't unfolded anything like I thought it would.
I've spent my share of time grieving over lost dreams - maybe it's better to call them life expectations. Over the past year, I've damned them and packed them away in boxes to stuff into the dusty attic of my brain never to be brought up again, like love notes from a seventh-grade boyfriend. They meant everything to me once. My life revolved around them. I moved with them. They don't mean anything to me anymore. And even if they did, I couldn't let you, nor my heart know they do.
It's sad and maddening to pack precious things like dreams away. Nothing bittersweet about it. It's bitter. It's painful to discover there is death and loss all the way through life. If not literal death, then the loss of friends you thought you'd always laugh with, talents you thought others would always applaud you for, and comforts you thought you'd always find on the other side of suffering.


The good news is that, even though life isn't what I thought it would be, I'm still living it. I'm safe. While I'm losing friends, I'm meeting others. While I'm saying goodbye to people and things I thought I'd always be committed to, I can take time to see things and love people I might have taken for granted before I learned that saying goodbye to precious things, dreams and people is apparently a neccessary part of life.

I've spent so much time making pit-stops for myself in life, looking back at the road I've just traveled to cry over what I thought it would be and all it has turned out not to be and how disappointing that is.
This pit-stop pattern has been annoying, but I think I'm finally learning something through it. I'm letting go more easily. I'm trusting God more readily. My dreams may all be crap He's trying to get rid of because they're keeping me from something I never knew He would use me for.
"He can use me in any way He chooses," I've always said. Now, I guess I'm nearer to the place where I really mean it. I give up. I surrender. I don't care where He takes me or how He breaks my heart (I say that...have mercy, Lord). I've had my dreams shattered time and again, and somehow He's brought me here where I'm safe and I'm alive and fed and somehow happy and freer than I've been before. Everything has worked out for good, you know? Just like He promised it would for someone who loves Him and is called according to His purpose.
It's funny. Loss or gain has all come to mean the same. It means that God's in control. There's no karma to life. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to the people who have hurt us the most. "He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous," Jesus said. It has nothing to do with whether God is on my team or theirs. It has to do with Him being in control, not me and all the good things that I've done to earn what I thought I'd receive if I did right enough, prayed hard enough, loved long enough and lived disciplined enough.
I've wasted alot of time crying over things I guess I thought I could earn, and I suppose, deserve. It turns out they just aren't in God's eternal plan for me and the big earth.
What's in His plan for me in His Word is that I'll come to know Him more and love and trust Him more because I know Him. I see this plan playing itself out in my life. Maybe that's what all my dreams have been for: serving to help me learn to trust Him, even when they don't come true?

He's in control. It's all okay. I've had dreams I didn't believe there was life on the other side of, but there is. And I'm at peace, and life is moving on. And it's good.