Freedom to Dream

I'm a dreamer. I'm pretty sure I always have been, and that hasn't always been easy for me. It means I dreamed up crazy things I wanted to do with my life, didn't always hold to the proper ideals for a young Christian woman, and I utterly despise practicality when it imposes itself upon my life. And I had many, many people when I was growing up speak caution to me. Most of them were well meaning, I'm sure. But unbeknownst to them, their words of caution crippled me. They made me start to doubt myself.


I allowed their words of caution to clip my wings. So, when I would have a crazy idea, I'd slap it down and chastise myself for not being practical.
"Don't you know you can't do that?"
"You cannot travel the world and be a responsible adult."
"Do you really want to waste your time on school when you really just want a family?"
"You know, if you'd just settle, you'd be married by now."
"You'll never make a living doing that."
"It would take too much time and my job keeps me too busy."
"That door isn't open, so God must want me to stay."
"You aren't good enough, strong enough, pretty enough...."
"You have too many other skills you'd be wasting."

I pushed down my dreams, reminding myself that "God has a plan." "All in God's time," I said. Over and over and over again, I tried to remind myself that I just "needed to be patient." Or that I needed to just change my attitude and everything would be right. After all, it's not where you are it's what you do with it, right?

But my wings still tried to beat. Oh, they tried! The dreams still came, my heart still ached to soar, to explore that unknown, to love in a different way.

And the war began. The voices of caution trying to drown the dreams welling up, begging for release. I shoved them down, all the while screaming on the inside, begging God to take away the need for something.... more. I screamed at heaven, tears pouring down my face, begging Him to just make things make sense. To help me be what I needed to be.

It is amazing how well we will justify repressing our true selves. I dressed this up in logistical reasons, called it duty, even made the claim that it was the path God had me on. But I was miserable.

It took a summer storm and the gentle words of a Jesuit Priest to shake away this idea of what I needed to be. And for the past year and a half, God has been showing me more and more of who I want to be. It has allowed me freedom to grow and stretch my wings. But I was still afraid to fly. The whispers were still too strong.  My heart was still too clouded by the words of doubt that others had planted there. My love of self was too weak.

I would watch movies like The Greatest Showman and sob as I watched Barnum realize his dreams, break down as he grins over at his wife as he finally figures it out, and be entirely unable to see the screen as he watched the faces of those he affected. I would play A Million Dreams on repeat endlessly, heart aching with the fact that I too had all those dreams.

My repressed dreams were wreaking havoc on my life: Paperwork was hell, family was brutal, work was miserable.... And I was breaking down over little things that normally I could have brushed off. But after over twenty years of people telling me what I could and couldn't do, after spending the past five years actively repressing what my soul yearned to do, my heart was ready to explode.

I finally fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face, and sobbed a single question: "God, can I dream? Am I allowed to dream?" I threw my heart out there, and I stared at that slowly pulsing part of me that I tried so hard to silence.

He reached down, gently picked up my heart, handed it back to me and said, "I've been waiting for you to ask."

Some people are given God's spirit of Fatherhood, some His ability to create beautiful things, some His teaching spirit.

Me? To me He gave His Dreamer's Heart. The Heart that dreamed up the mountains, the northern lights, the mighty oceans. The Heart that dreamed the Creation of Man and the Incarnation to save him. The Heart that dreamed me into existence beats inside of me. It doesn't simply see the world as it is, broken and hurting. It sees the world as it could be with just a little bit of love and care. He gave me wild ideas (but really? Do you expect something normal from the God who created the turkey and the aardvark?) and a crazy passion that I'd been ignoring for years.

While God was whispering "Fly," I was listening to the voice that said, "You can't." I was too afraid to fail, because that's exactly what everyone said I would do. With utter tenderness, he slipped this song into my life and whispered, "There is a moment where fear and dreams must collide."

"You are my dream," He whispered into my heart. "Let me Dream in you again. Let me be the Dreamer. You have let Satan Nightmare in you long enough. Dream with me - Fly with me! You do not have to fly alone. You don't have to do this alone. Let go of the things holding you to the life that suffocates you. You may fall, yes. Do you trust me? Will you dream with me? Will you risk falling in order to change your world? Will you let me be Barnum and lead you to a world we can make together?"

For me to deny the part of me that dreams is to deny the Dream of God. It is to deny a crucial part of both Him and myself. He doesn't allow me to dream, He begs me to.

"I don't want to look back in five years and think, 'I could have been magnificent, but I was too afraid.' In five years, I want to tell of how fear tried to cheat me out of the best thing in life, but I didn't let it" -Unknown

My failure was to think that God wanted to limit me. It was not trusting myself or loving myself enough to listen to my heart. So, if you have big dreams, don't hide them. Don't ignore them, squash them, or make them small enough for the world to accept. That's not the point of a dream. A Dream is supposed to shake the world, to make it more beautiful, to help heal the hurts the nightmares have wrought.

So, Dream big, my friends. Dream big.