Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts

Sunday, February 27, 2011

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.