Since my entire blog is focused entirely on my dreams and goals in life...I saw it fitting to have my first post be a summary of where I am in my life. It is something I recently wrote during a very defining moment in my life...here it is...
What if?
Busy streets, hectic work schedules, more jobs than you know what to do with, stress, anxiety, not enough family time…replace that with country roads, NO work schedules, NO jobs, peace and relaxation, YOU choose when to spend time with family and for how long.
What if….
Why do we stop dreaming? All of a sudden, we hit a certain age, get a certain “dream job”, get married, have kids…etc…and it’s like we hit a button that turns off our imagination and the pathway to our dreams. We replace “What if?” with “What now?”
Why? What is it with us thinking we need to quit dreaming when we get to that point in our lives?
When I was a child, I dreamed many HUGE dreams. Dreams that as I child, I KNEW would come true! I wouldn’t have to put in the effort that would require me to achieve such dreams, because I was a child…dreams always come true! Right? …Kind of.
In my 6th grade classroom we were required to draw our dream life on paper. My paper had a huge blue house, with a white picket fence. In the top hand corner I drew a huge horse barn, and just a few yards away was the pathway to the top of a hill where I could look out into the sunset and watch my horses run. In the back of my house, were a huge pool and a tennis court! I drew me and my future husband swinging on the porch swing and our two kids playing football in the back yard. I decided to have my own recording studio in a separate building off to the right side of the paper. I don’t have that picture anymore but I can remember each specific bush and where it was positioned, how my driveway curved around pine trees and around and behind my house where my three stall car garage was drawn. Why do I remember all of that? Because it was my dream. It was what I wanted my life to look like when I was older.
Don’t we all do this? When we are young, we all have some kind of picture in our heads about what our life is going to be like someday….but we don’t really see HOW we are going to come up with the MONEY, TIME, and ENERGY it will take to make this dream reality. We get conditioned to figure out how we are going to survive, instead of how we are going to be free and live.
Reality…Webster’s dictionary defines it as, “the state or quality of being real. “ As we grow older, and society starts to make a bigger impact on our lives…as we start to find that first job…as we make our way through the world…reality starts to feel a lot less like it did several years ago when we were dreaming away as children.
In my life in particular… society, including those I am close to had a big impact on how I was thinking about my future. All I was hearing was, “Where are you going to college?” and “How are you going to get a job that will give you the income you need to survive?” I heard phrases like, “It’s great to dream, it’s what keeps you going, but then at some point you have to come back to reality and realize it’s not going to happen.” Something about these words made me cringe.
Then came along the professor who shattered what was barely left of my childhood dreams. And then it happened…I had that “society” mindset. And quickly my childhood dreams vanished right before my eyes.
A couple years later, I regained one tiny glimpse of my dreams. I married the man of my dreams, and had my dream wedding. I was on top of the world and I felt like that 6th grade girl again. When the honeymoon was over, reality soared back into my life. That gray cloud of adulthood set back in.
Now, as I FINALLY approach the end of my schooling, my dreams are no longer kept at a stop sign, while my life flies through the green light. Is it because I’m reaching the finish line of my schooling? NO…because something big happened in my life.
I’m sitting here today with a completely different mindset. Now that I AM an adult, I still have those same dreams. Only now they aren’t a drawing on a piece of paper, they are a goal that I have set, and WILL reach. My dreams haven’t changed; I have just found what I need to do to achieve them. Now I don’t just want a horse ranch…I want to ride the horses to the top of that hill where my husband and I can look off the edge at God’s beautiful creation. I want to watch my kids swim in the pool and watch them laugh and have fun. I want the big blue house, so I can enjoy the company and fellowship of my friends and family gathered in one place. I still want the tennis courts, only now I want to teach my kids how to play tennis and share in their excitement as they finally hit that tennis ball over the net! I still want the big backyard…only now I want the yard where my family can throw the football and have fun enjoying each other. I’ve developed new dreams of taking vacation with my family, homeschooling my kids so I can get rid of the textbooks and teach them about presidents at Mount Rushmore, and they can learn about nature by sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon as we read the story of creation. The best part is, that my husband shares these same dreams, and we are working on them together.
We have found our chance to block out those things that were quickly taking away our dreams, and we’ve started running down the pathway toward our goal.
I’m asking you to remember that gray cloud that came rolling in…and the instant it got in the way of keeping your eyes on your dream. There is nothing wrong with your dreams coming true, but there is something wrong with not trying to get there. We are unstoppable…and we WILL get to our goal.
Ask yourself...What if?
