Giving Hope another Fly
I started a new job recently, abandoning a hard-earned dream that someone else owned. I picked up one abandoned long ago. Dusty, faint and never fully realized. Like pulling your fall sweater from the depths of your closet where you threw it in celebration of spring. The sweater feels a bit like a long-lost friend, a hope you had forgotten.
Building your dream through someone else’s money does a funny thing to you. It splits you in two. One part working his ass off to build this picture inside your head. The other part kicking and screaming, “it’ll never be yours, so why do you care?” The struggle between the two was exhausting. Creating my vision in someone else’s head, well, it killed me.
Survival of the business far more pressing than my own, the division snuck up on me. It came gently, drowned out by the immediacy of the daily tasks at hand. My visions, my hopes were always getting trampled in confusion and muddled with coffee. My heart was being pulled in two very different directions. My vision conflicting with money. My reasonableness conflicting with ideals. Til one day I woke up and my heart was on the floor, clean ripped in two. Hope totally rung out to dry.
So I laid that dream to bed, leaving no regrets. Thankful for the opportunity to try and I am very glad to have been forged in the fire. Stitching my heart back together, rediscovering pleasures I’d lost time to enjoy. Giving hope another fly. Who knows if this dream, long forgotten in the back of the closet will prove any better than the last. But I’m a dreamer, a painter, a vision maker and I know no other way to live. So I’ll lay my heart on the line and bend my back to the plow at least one more time, not knowing what lies at the finish line. For who really does? But by God I will not give up trying. To cease trying is true death from which one does not rise.
For we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. Romans 15:13