Holding on and letting go of our dreams

Dreams are part and parcel of our lives. None of us can live without them. Even when we are unaware of our dreams, our imagination has gone ahead and created a picture for us, something that we live for in the future.

All of our subsequent dreams are built on our early ones. As children we all had a guiding image which drew us into life. Maybe it was something we invented or fantasied about after reading fairy stories or chose because of pain we were facing, or took on from our parents. Dreams don’t last forever. They can come to a halt. And as we mature we will need to upgrade and maybe let go of our early dreams to revision our futures [perhaps only being forced to because of a crisis in our lives].

What is God’s dream for us? He is doing all He can to enable us to achieve fullness and freedom and to find ourselves. He’s got us on a journey of formation. We will need to avoid the temptation to run away from our past or our future and to learn to hold the tension of the known and unknown at each stage in our lives.

We’re each given on average 25,000 days on earth. They will eventually run out for all of us so we need to manage each precious day and not be duped into believing that just caring for external things is our most important task. The trams in hilly San Francisco are attached to cables under the earth, but then have to release their grip at an intersection in order to attach to new cables, which take them in a new direction. Like them, we are asked to stay strongly connected to God, sensitive to where we are going and what dreams we are being asked to let go of, and do all we can to follow our bigger life purpose – a risky yet exciting adventure!