When dreams die…
Growing up, I had so many dreams for my life. From a very young age I always thought that God was going to use me in some form of ministry. I remember as a teenager my best friends’ dad was an evangelist, he used to take us with him when he went to preach in the township schools. He would ask us to share our testimony, and then afterwards we served peanut butter sandwiches, yes sandwiches, couldn’t very well preach to kids with empty stomachs now could we! We had a dream of quitting school and evangelizing Africa, not to the delight of our parents. Even in our youth group, our leaders used to work for YWAM, and so we did a lot of outreach, and something inside of me came alive in those times, like I was doing what I had been created to do. It was by no means a bad dream, perhaps a dream that may still come to pass?
Media helps to fuel our belief systems that every story has to have a happy ending, and that if you believe in something enough somehow it will work out just the way you planned it to. Be your own master of your fate and destiny. After 45 years of life I do believe some dreams come true, when others don’t. Some formulas work for some, whilst for others it doesn’t. There is no twelve step program to make life go the way you want it to, life is unpredictable. This is the harsh reality it’s taken me ages to get my head around.
Some may say well Molly that’s cynical, perhaps it is, because for me life happened, and those dreams may still come to pass, but the journey there hasn’t been what I expected at all. For some reason every attempt at trying to fulfill my dreams, no matter how hard I tried, came to nothing. So I gave up on that dream and settled for lesser dreams. Loving the creative I even had a stint at being involved in christian outreach theatre for a living, for a season it did but eventually that too came to nothing. Then I met my soul mate, and best friend, and life took on a different path, we got married and my dreams became our dreams. We dreamt of having a ministry/business that affected the Kingdom of God. We made an attempt to move to Florida to help with a church ministry where we were happy, but our immigration failed. We then had to start again back in the UK, and amazingly I fell pregnant after years of trying. My dream of a wonderful transition into motherhood was rocked by me almost losing mine and my daughter’s life whilst giving birth, followed by years of post natal depression. In that period even more of my dreams died. From then on I just wanted to be happy, that is all.
Our marriage and outlook on life became battered and bruised, in no way reflecting the Hollywood poster of happily ever after, blissfully living in a fantasy. However slowly but surely God began to bring healing to us, and eventually we began to settle more into who God had made us to be. I still struggled a lot with my health, but my husband’s business started to do well, and he was using this to change other’s lives too. We had finally reached measure of happiness and acceptance of the life we lived, because it was a life lived not for ourselves or our dreams but in pursuit of God, and His dreams.
Then a chilling day in September came along when James was diagnosed with Leukemia. In a journey of trauma,shock and pain, something settled in us, and if you have read my blog before you know despite the pain, it ignited a faith in us we didn’t know we had, to believe for complete healing…perhaps this was going to be the springboard that God was going to use to catapult us into the ministry God had for us, a much greater more noble dream. I had never believed so much in something than I did in this. So it’s fair to say that when that fateful day came when I had to witness my best friend take his last breath and enter into eternity without me, I was left bewildered and confused, more than I had ever been my entire life. Why had God chosen not to give us a dream that would make Him look amazing?
This was followed by the loss of two close friends and my dad all within eight months of each other. This left me shell shocked, like a napalm bomb had gone off and all that was left was ashes, ashes of where once dreams big and small had resided, with me in ragged clothes staring at the scene that lay before me, trying to make out if anything around me looked even vaguely familiar or safe.
From that day, I no longer had a dream. All my dreams for thirteen years of marriage had been dreams dreamt with us as a family. When he died my dreams died, and part of me died too.
I’d like to say that life got easier, as I expected I deserved. That beauty arose from the ashes into a budding testimony of restoration, but for nineteen months I’ve had to walk through my own personal hell. When it says though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… That valley became a very real to me in every way. Every day has been a walk of trust, blindly hoping that the light will shine in. Life feels like one big battle, and in the midst of it I feel bruised, beaten and exhausted. You see for so long I always had a plan, somewhere deep inside always a dream to hold onto, I have been reduced to just hoping I get through each day in tact, hoping I have given my daughter all I can, and then longing for just one night of good sleep.
I had gone from dreaming of evangelizing nations, to knowing I would just be happy to feel normal again.
I look back and say to myself, this isn’t how my life was supposed to go. How did I end up here? I’ve been thrust into a situation I didn’t choose for myself, and somehow I just have to accept it and deal with it. I’d give anything to have my old life back, as less than perfect as it was, not this lonely one I now face. I only have to pop the TV on or read social media to find even the slightest cruel reminder of just how alone I feel.
I can hear all the Christians shouting “but you’re not alone, God is with you.” Yes, I have never doubted it, wouldn’t be here if I did, but it doesn’t replace the feel of a human physical presence that you have come to know for 13 years of your life. But you know, I sit here believing it’s okay for me to not be okay. God knows I’m not okay, He hears me most nights, as long as I’ve not rejected Him, I think He’s more than able to understand that Molly really isn’t okay now, in fact He understands I’m in a world of pain, otherwise He never would have said He was close to the brokenhearted and those crushed in spirit. In fact it’s in the times that Chloe needs my embrace the most that I feel the closest to her.
That’s where I come with the wondering of my spirit, perhaps life wasn’t supposed to just be about white picket fences and holidays with your 4 children in Aspen. Nothing wrong with those (I envy you if you have that.) Somehow hearing that sometimes we aren’t going to be okay in this life makes us very uncomfortable. Perhaps God doesn’t see himself as some big Father Christmas in the sky that hands out whatever gift we request. Perhaps He sees the beginning from the end, and this life as merely temporary. Perhaps here in the West we have come to believe that as a Christian life should always go the way we trust it should? Perhaps we have got it very wrong and need to have a complete paradigm shift in the way we see things? Especially when the persecuted church see it as an honor to suffer for Christ.
Brennan Manning puts this so well in his book ‘Abba’s Child’ when he talks about people who have had their lives broken and battered on their journey to eternity, “Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.” Only the wounded soldiers, of course, because how can we relate and give comfort if we ourselves have never encountered a battle? Again he states, “…Wounds of pain and sadness make us aware of our inner poverty and create an emptiness that becomes the free space into which Christ can pour his healing power.”
Perhaps this is what Paul means in 2 Corinthians 12:9 “I shall be very happy to make my weakness my special boast so that the power of Christ may stay over me.”
I don’t really understand why I am where I am, or what God is doing, and it does hurt when He seems so far away and so distant from my pain. It’s confusing when my prayers seem to produce the opposite, I’m desperate for a break, I’m exhausted beyond belief, just wanting so much for something to go right, and to feel a glimmer of normality. Hoping one day the torment will stop. Somewhere in the distance my hope is that one day (hopefully soon) God will use all the deep pain, all the bone weariness of the battle to bring life and meaning to others. If I could just see above the fog, feel true joy again that would be great! For today that is my dream.
