A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes...

I think I have successfully erased the majority of my memories from middle school. I usually complain about my permanent loss of brain cells during pregnancy, but when regarding the years of 5th grade through 7th grade, I am forever grateful to the miracle of forgetfulness. I was usually one of the first kids on the bus in the morning, which meant sharing a long ride with kids that didn't particularly like me (and let's be honest, I didn't like them either.) But, bus rides had a funny way of bringing 'not usually' friends together, just to stay entertained during the bumpy ride. The kids on my bus liked to play MASH.

Mansion. Apartment. Shack. House. A game where you hoped the odds were ever in your favor as your fate was determined by someone who didn't care if you lived in a shack someday with Pauly Shore, had 18 kids and worked in a toll booth. But everyone DID care... when it was their turn... hoping to be paired up with the cutest guy on the list of possible husbands (JTT was a fave) and hoping that guy was a rich lawyer and lived in a mansion. Even as a middle schooler, ideals and standards had been set in our minds as to what the perfect "dream" life would look like when we were older. And a scribbled game on a torn piece of notebook paper was the preteen tarot card of our future.

Now, I absolutely adore Disney movies. But the story of Cinderella really set our young, impressionable hearts up for disappointment. I would have LOVED a fairy godmother to swoop down, hours before my sophomore semi-formal and turn my short-sleeved brown - yes, BROWN - dress into a shimmering, head-turning beauty. Let's face it, every little girl wants to grow up to marry a prince and live in a castle. It's the ultimate fantasy. Fantasy.

I'd had different ideas of what my future would look like. By the time I was a college student, I knew a couple of things for sure. I wanted to be married. Soon. Like the day after I graduated. It just made sense. I also knew that I wanted to have kids, probably four or five and really hoping for a set of twins. I wanted to be a working mom, and actually, I think 'saving the world' may have been on my list of tasks to conquer. Dreams for me have always been BIG. Go big or go home. Oh, how God must have looked down on me and laughed at me when I said that. "Go big? You think that's big?" He'd ask. I can just picture Him laughing, saying, "Ok. We'll go big." And I had no clue.

I think I often get stuck in 'dream' mode. I see the end result and I want to get there so bad. My dreams are perfect - I am in control of them and they always turn out exactly how they should be. The odds are always in my favor. But here's the thing with my dreams - the parts where I have to work really hard to get to the 'dream', the parts where obstacles arise and new plans need to be made in order to overcome them, the parts where the characters and circumstances change... all those get left out of my thought process. That's because a dream isn't just a dream. It's a journey. And a journey isn't something we can plan out. It's an unknown adventure. And as much as I desire to arrive where I set out to be, I will never get there if my dream doesn't line up with God's vision for me.

In Psalm 20:4 David presents this prayer, "May he give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed." There were so many times I prayed for God to give me what I wanted. A better job. A different boss. Friends in new places. Healthy babies. A bigger house. More time. Patience. Smaller stretch marks during my second pregnancy (I really should have prayed for NO stretch marks the first time around, kicking myself for that one!) So often my prayers were centered around me - my plans - what I thought would be the best thing for ME. As my faith and relationship with Jesus deepened over the past few years, I came to understand that Scripture in the Psalms differently. Instead of asking God to give me what I want - I have begun to ask Him to make the desires of my heart like His.

I don't have the best track record in knowing what is best for me. Plenty of times I have said "no" to God - whatever He was asking me to do just did not fit into my dreamy vision. And as many times as I have said no, God has come back with a big fat YES and proven me ever so wrong about what I thought I wanted.

Thirty-two years old, married to a farmer, two kids in tow, living in a house owned by my husband's grandmother, in a small town with no Starbucks or Anthropologie... Had I had this glimpse of my life five years ago, I would have been singing the Sesame Street song, "Which one of these things doesn't belong here?" But I know now what I didn't know then, and that is the journey I took to get here. And I wouldn't change a thing.

I am much different than I was five years ago. Though there have been some hardships, disappointments, and BIG changes to MY plans, my life's journey that God has allowed me to experience has taken me all over the world, meeting some incredible people. He has allowed me opportunities to use my gifts and talents in ways I never would have been able to create for myself. The Lord has blessed me and my family in unimaginable ways. And I am proud of the hard work my husband and I have put into creating this dream life for our family. It's no easy task raising two little boys (twins, what was I thinking?!?) and there are many days that I dream of a bigger linen closet where our sheets, blankets and towels can each have their own shelves. But, I am learning to appreciate and anticipate the journey, more than dwelling on the end result.

This past week, the Lord gave our family a big leap forward towards our dream of building our own house. We closed on a nice little chunk of land out in the country. A creek with a line of trees borders one end of the property, and there is the most perfect sledding hill with a lovely narrow valley nestled in between. Our dream home will sit perched on top of the hill, surveying the lush green acres below. It is going to be hard work - cleaning up the land, tearing down barbed wire fences, excavating the ground, and of course all that goes into building a house - but when I remind myself of Galatians 6:9, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up," I recall God's promise to me, His plans to prosper me with a bountiful harvest.

I am excited about this life that God has blessed me with. Though I had always pictured something different, God wanted to go bigger. And although I haven't saved the world yet, nor do I even aspire to do such a thing (I've learned my limits), its moments when my two and four year olds climb into my lap and tell me they love me, and I feel like a superhero. I am so thankful to serve a God who knows me better than I know myself.

Tonight, the boys and I brought some homemade pizza out to Eric who was tearing down some old fencing and rotten tree stumps on the new property. We set up a little dinner table amidst the alfalfa and ate as a family, in a spot that will hopefully someday be an actual dining room in an actual house. Cinderella can have her castle. I'm loving every bit of this BIG dream that God created for me... and I'm along for the long haul.