“Sometimes the only appropriate course of action is a good cry…”
This came up in my Facebook memories as my status update 10 years ago.
The reference of this memory is the selling of a camper trailer I had owned and had planned to travel in with my ex. Selling it was one of the final steps in the closure and completion of my divorce. Selling it represented not just a physical loss but the huge emotional loss of broken promises and shattered dreams, and yes, when it was driven out of my driveway, I sat down and had a good cry.
A wise friend once told me, I had to lay down some of my dreams because they were being built on an unstable foundation. Over the course of the past decade I have realised time and again how true these words proved to be. Often we have to let our dreams die and be buried so that God can resurrect them, usually in ways we couldn’t have even imagined!
But, God given dreams never fully die.
I love the story of Joseph in Genesis chapters 37 – 50. Joseph waited 13 years for his dreams to come to fruition… and it’s encouraging to us to know he made a few mistakes along the way!
One of Joseph’s first and biggest mistakes was to tell his brothers about his dream. We can, and should, learn a lot from this…. Not everyone is going to share in your excitement about the dreams God has placed in your heart. This is exactly the thing that led to the status at the start of this blog. God placed the dream and the call to ministry in my heart over twelve years ago and I had started to take tentative steps, as I was led into fulfilling this call. Like Joseph, I was naïve and immature in my excitement and thought that everybody else would feel the same. Right? Wrong. My ex was seriously freaked out by my newfound wholeness and desire to share what I had found with the rest of the world. His solution? Have an affair with another insecure woman who would feed his ego in ways that I no longer was. I was shattered. I did everything I could to save my marriage, but no-one wins a fight that only one person is in.
Fast forward ten years, and obviously there is much more to this story that is still to be told but suffice to say, God is restoring my dream of travel. He has blessed me with an incredible man of integrity… and now a new camper trailer! God is also restoring my dream of ministry but there are still sacrifices to be made and, like Joseph, I have had to learn a few things along the way.
I had to learn to stay faithful to my God given dreams. I had to learn to trust, even in the darkest moments. I had to learn to believe that I was worthy of love and I had to learn to believe that I had something to say that people would want to listen to. But, most of all I am learning that God’s picture is so much bigger than anything I could have dreamed or imagined. I believe there are blessings that will come in my next season that will absolutely blow not only my mind but others who God has chosen my journey to have an impact upon “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…” Genesis 50:20a. Resting in God is an exciting place to be!
I guess my final thought is this… if you have had to let go of a dream, let it go, have a good cry and then leave it to God. He knows what He is doing… and He is much better at planning our lives than we are!
Romans 8:28
