Dreams on your coatrack?

What’s holding back your dreams?

Within a few weeks of moving to Green Street, I found myself at the bookstore around the corner, pulling out my favorite novel and flipping open a journal. Ideas formed, stringing into sentences in my mind.

Later that day, I realized I hadn’t written creatively in years. It was like I had run out of energy even to imagine creatively. In fact, I began watercoloring because I assumed my literary days were over.

Yet the writer in me is coming home.

The more she comes home—the more I scribble thoughts on spare scraps of paper and douse my work with words—the more I reflect on why and how she went… what caused my literary grave? What causes graves in general?

Break my heart

A friend prayed that once, and the Lord did. In one season, she lost something dear to her. Looking back months later, she saw with clarity how much that something needed to change, yet the pain lingered for years.

Broken hearts are one of the hardest illnesses to heal from. They happen in all sorts of relationships: parental, peer, romantic, work… the closer you get to a person, the greater the risk of emotional injury.

I wish there was a miracle balm to soothe heartbreak, but often the most effective balm is time. In the meantime, dreams seem to be hung up on the coat rack. It’s as if our minds have simply no space for creativity… indeed, a therapist might say they don’t. All energy is expended adjusting to what was lost.

If I could go back and tell my dull imagination, “This is seasonal. You will heal. You will come back alive again,” after the cancellation of my wedding, I would have anchored myself with those words.

In many ways, grief feels like fear, the opposite of dreaming. We reflect and reminisce and accept what we lost. The future feels dark and far off… what we wanted is not present, nor will be again.

I can’t go back and comfort myself, but if I can offer comfort to you now. If your future feels like curtains drawn over an empty stage, if your heart suffers from the grieving process, there will be light at the end of the tunnel. Dreams will return; you must only journey through.

Comfortability

Another reason dreams stall is when we’re comfortable, too comfortable. Comfortability is different than safety. Safety brings our body, heart, mind, and spirit into rest and wholeness, which lays the foundation for creativity, and therefore risk. Comfortability is the absence of challenge—routine, familiarity, sameness.

Sometimes we get too comfortable in our communities, our morning routine, our ideas. Even our work can become too comfortable. We find ourselves content to do the bare minimum… lulled to sleep in our imaginations because bills are getting paid. Our free time is spent being entertained, rather than innovating. We don’t pursue new challenges; rather we watch, read, or listen to others pursuing their challenges… and that makes us feel fulfilled.

I’m not talking about a season of rest and healing. If you’re suffering burnout, then by all means, binge that TV series, puzzle all night, read a book at a coffee shop every weekend. But don’t dull yourself into thinking that’s all you’re made for.

I’ve spent little enough time with the elderly to learn that you never arrive. There’s always room to become more of who you were called and created to be. Don’t strive toward it, but don’t stop reaching. If a 70-year-old woman can plan her first missions trip, if an 80-year-old grandmother can teach herself how to sew purses for her granddaughter, if a 95-year-old man can find a way to navigate the grocery store while going blind… there’s so much more for us.

Sit with your heart long enough, and you’ll hear the inward calling for that more. You don’t need to be a star, or great, or a history maker. You just need to become you… the beautiful destiny that explains why you’re here on this earth at this time.

If you don’t think you have one, consider the roses. A rose never tires of unfolding herself into her greatest possible bloom… and she is praised by passerby after passerby, decade after decade.

Dead end

Maybe you are in a season of dreaming—you’ve pursued every imaginable thought process, constructed what you can toward your dream purpose, your dream life—and you’re stuck at a wall.

Some walls feel impassable. Perhaps stress, fatigue, or physical sickness has stopped you short. Or your dreams require finances you do not have or there is fear, crippling your decision-making process.

Maybe there’s something you need you don’t know how to get or where it is. Maybe you’re busy caretaking someone, building someone else’s dream at work, or so fatigued you simply don’t have the energy to pursue your calling.

Maybe you simply lack time. You need time to do the thing you want to do… and you don’t have enough of it, barely for yourself.

The trouble with walls like these is that sometimes they’re within our control and sometimes they’re not. It can be especially frustrating when we hit a wall that feels out of our control… like spraining a wrist as a professional rock climber. You can ice it, stretch it, do physical therapy on it, and yet at the end of the day, you can’t force it to heal earlier than it’s ready.

This is how I felt when I developed an intense illness in my 15th year. For three months, my body was in pain. My brain was so foggy that I only had the capacity to watch a few movies during the day and hold a brief conversation with a family member. Even now, I have little memory of what happened those days.

When we hit walls like this, there are only three things we can do:

• Do what you can. If you can walk a little each day, carve out morning time for yourself, find an activity that helps you calm your fear, whatever is holding you back—if there is something mental, emotional, and physical you can do that’s in your control—do it. It will make you feel better.
• Trust. Trust that there is a greater power in control—that your wall is seasonal, not forever. That someday life will look different and speed up again. You were made for a purpose, and even the most successful people have experienced seasons of setbacks.
• Surrender. Some things are not in your control, so stop trying to control them. You’ll only exhaust and depress yourself. Let go of what needs to be let go, and accept that it’s out of your control.

Yourself (ourselves)

What you believe about your life determines how you live. If you don’t believe you have a greater purpose or that the desires of your heart are valuable and needed in this great, churning earth, then you won’t pursue them.

For the longest time, I was held in bondage to the belief that my life would only be what happened to me and the divine opportunities God placed before me. It wasn’t until my engagement was broken off that I realized I had choices, so many choices, and God wanted me to make them myself.

“What do you want, Ana?” I felt Him ask me.

I didn’t know I could have what I wanted… that it would be holy enough for Him or accomplishable by myself. But turns out, my choices to pursue therapy, to add an extra Music degree during college, to learn marketing at a ministry, to move to Green Street, to start this blog, were, in fact, my choices, not His. And He backed them up. I took all the steps I could take, and He did the rest.

Sometimes we are what holds back our dreams. Take some time today to think about what you want. Reach for the sky and get all the ideas out there. Then begin the process of choosing the dreams you most desire, and walk in their direction. I can almost guarantee that the best life we dream up was made for us anyway… put in our hearts by a loving Creator, higher purpose, or whatever you believe.

What’s one dream you’ve quietly hung on the coat rack? Write it down today!