Dream Catcher

   

    What good is a dream if you don’t have someone to share it with? It is like going to the ice cream stand to indulge in a frozen treat or riding a rollercoaster that thrills your socks off all by yourself. Such adventures beckon a companion to share in the encounter.

    That makes sense I would say, but I am not sure what my dream even is. I know I had a lot of them as a kid. I wanted to be an actress, a lawyer, and a choreographer and that was all in my fifth-grade year, but lately…I have been trying to figure out what is “the dream.”

    Maybe I lost it because I have lived a little too long.  Am I too old to dream? It seems sometimes that it is unrealistic to look beyond the responsibility of family life. Maybe I have been so overwhelmed with the to-do list that I forgot to take a minute to ask: what is it that I would love to do anyway?

   Sometimes I think dreams have been over-rated. I used to dream of getting married and having a family. Now I have one and I have learned no dream comes without a price. Right now the price is…tween mood swings and being the screen police. So maybe I am discouraged.

    Whatever the excuse I can come up with it doesn’t change the fact that I need to dream, you need to dream. We were made to dream. In the dreaming we have hope that what we see today doesn’t have to be what we live tomorrow and the next day and so on.

    I love to hear stories of unlikely dream pursuers. My husband’s grandmother had always dreamed of finishing high school, so in her sixties, she got her diploma. I recently met a woman that at 91 still goes snow skiing weekly. I have a dear friend that decided to become a missionary to India in her retirement and has spent her time hugging children and helping families in India ever since. Such stories inspire me to stop making excuses and start taking the time to dream.

    We limit ourselves with all the reasons why we can’t dream without uttering a word to anyone else, but what if we started to share our dream?  What if your hope could ignite someone else’s? Who knows how your dream might just set off a chain reaction in the lives of your friends and family.

    In reality, life is complicated and at any moment we can list a lot of reasons why it is better just to drudge on, but I want to encourage us to let the little child dream from within us. That little one that believes we can be anything we put our minds to. Now that we are older we have a better grasp of what it is that really excites us. That thing that makes you and I come alive. What if that thing was tailor made for us to pursue?

Maybe I am just dreaming here, but I invite you to come along for the ride.