First we must dream

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
Anatole France

I believe in my dreams. I believe that dreams can come true. If I act as if those dreams can come to fruition, I set myself up to succeed in attaining them.

Grace. Unmerited favor. I have been blessed with a life that is beyond my wildest imaginings. It is through Grace that I have been saved from the scrap heap and rocketed into the fourth dimension of existence. I am living a life that I could have could have hardly dreamed of at one time.

It is hard to pinpoint an exact moment at which the dream began to come true, but if I had to it would be when I began to take night classes to re-assemble my teaching career ten years ago. I had destroyed my career, and my life in general, by excessive drinking. I had completely failed as a human being. I took a job as an assistant in a classroom, a job I was vastly over-qualified for, and one at which I was hardly confident that I could succeed at. I struggled to wrap my brain around one night class at a time. Slowly, one class and one job at a time, I began to climb up and out of the deep hole I had dug myself into.

There are a lot of "I's" in that paragraph. I did this, I did that. But really all I did was begin to show up for life. From one moment to the next, it was all I could do to just try one more day to do the things that were laid in front of me. As several years passed, I started to believe that, with God's help, I began to believe that there was something out there better than the way I had been living. Really, anything was better than the way I had been living.

Yes, I acted. Yes I planned. But more importantly, I came to believe. To believe that through God's grace I might be restored to sanity. I do dare to have dreams today. I do believe that they can come true. I have been so truly blessed. I don't know what God has in store for me, but anything is better than the way it was.