Catching Your Dream

When What You Were Dying to Have Turns Out Completely Different

This past week, a long-time-coming hope finally took shape. At my house, we’d all been holding our breath for months, enduring the status quo, somehow making our situation work. I’d prayed one of those I-can’t-take-anymore prayers. But when the prayers were finally answered, I was surprised not by joy but with distress.

And boy, I was not ready for my dream to end.

Some dreams-come-true then splat like a ice-water balloon in January. In fact, everyone I know has this problem. We build these dreams and then we think we can control how they play out. We buy into the dream that the grass is greener somewhere else while we forget the good things on our own side of the fence.

Many a relationship has crashed and burned because nobody really counted the cost of a change in partners. Or we stay too long in relationships that slowly eat our souls.  Either way, we don’t always know if our choices are going to realize whatever dream we’ve told ourselves.

We think we know what we want until we’ve waded a little too far from shore. That’s when the sink hole beneath our feet reminds us once again that we are definitely not God.

I once dreamed of becoming a famous actress. My parents tried to discourage me, even as I insisted on trying out for community theater. No doubt Mom and Dad pitied me, knowing full well that a girl with a paralyzed arm would never make it.

To prove them wrong, I spent summers organizing, writing, directing and acting in productions in my neighborhood. Which is to say that I roped my little sister’s friends into participating. Heck, I even choreographed their performances.

My dream was to put on the First Annual Intergalactic Convention on a backyard patio, with a white sheet curtain and sound from my little record player, playing 78 rpm classical selections from my gramma’s music teacher days. I made up dances for every intergalactic visitor, designed costumes and constructed spaceships from cardboard boxes.

If I couldn’t be a famous one-armed actress, I could make these kids do my bidding. If my sister threatened to quit and take her buddies with her, I had bribes ready. After all, this was my dream, not hers.

Sadly, the first production was the last. And as I grew up, I became more and more aware of my limitations. Dreams were my private vanity. I wore a brave face for my world, but I doubted God would ever force a Hollywood director to knock on my door. Every time I got on stage, I was so self-conscious about my disability that I could barely remember my lines.

Most of the time, my dreams are so well-rehearsed that if reality veers away even a little bit, I’m shocked. Sometimes I even tell God it wasn’t my dream anyway, that God misunderstood my request like a hard-of-hearing mall Santa. What I want and what I get are often very different.

In this latest crazy dream outcome, it turns out that change is really hard even when you’ve been begging God to change things for eons. If experience is any indicator, the upheaval that blows through our household like an angry dust devil will at some point calm down. The change will become the new normal. I’ll dream new dreams. I’ll also whine and mewl at God that I’m the only person on earth who doesn’t have what I want. I’ll keep at it until either God sighs and gives in or I finally realize what this dream will cost me.

God gently nudged adult-me away from the stage lights and I revised my dreams. I’d settle for becoming a famous writer. I know I’m not the only one—in dreams we all seem to aim for the stars. But fame in any way is very costly, both to private and public lives. So many times, we aren’t very good at reading the price tag for all we desire. Lack of gratitude limits our ability to appreciate what is.

These days my dreams are getting much smaller but much deeper. Each day, I dream I can make someone’s day a teensy bit better. I dream of hearing birdsong as if for the first time, of being astonished by the color of a son’s eyes or the way the wind swishes through the maple leaves. I dream of dipping my fingers in a creek like a blind person and drinking in the scent of lilacs.

These small but mighty dreams help me get through the chaos of change—because life is change. And if I fail at changing the world around me, I must then look inward and see what I can change about myself.

This kind of choreography takes a lot of practice, guided by a commitment to love more, better, wider, deeper. I’m as good at it as I am a one-armed famous actress, but I don’t need a cardboard box spaceship to chase these kinds of dreams.