Of School and Essays

Last year for school I was reading the book The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. After going through the main discussion questions, there was one final 'bonus' question that read How should we react when it seems that our dreams are failing to come true? The options were 'discuss this question' or 'write an essay', and since I was already discussing the whole book with myself, I thought it was a better idea to write. This is what I came up with.

Dreams.

What’s in a dream? Hopes, plans, desires for the future. These are all good things. But what happens when the world turns upside down? What happens when circumstances change drastically, seemingly for the worse? What happens when our dreams don’t seem to be coming true?

For the Christian, the only right place to be is in the center of God’s will. The way to know if you are in His will is if everything is going according to plan, right? Wrong. The first thing we have to realize is that everything always goes according to plan, just not always our plan. Thankfully, where our means fail, God never has failed to come through. Another important point is that sometimes our plans are not His plans. When obstacles arise in the pursuit of our dreams, or they seem to be failing altogether, the primary reaction should be to make sure that we are in His will; to make sure that we weren’t just following our own agenda.

Dreams are seeds. They have great potential, but they must die in order to even aspire to greatness. When a dream is planted in the ground of a willing heart, watered with prayer, and supplemented with God’s word, it still must die. Only after it dies and we surrender it completely to God can He cause it to grow, either into what we imagined, or something better and more glorious. It's hard to tell by looking at the tiny seed of the Redwood tree what kind of giant is stored away inside.

When everything is coming down at us and there seems to be failure at every turn, don’t worry, don’t become angry, just pray and then work hard toward whatever God directs you to do, and do it with your whole heart.

So go on. Dream. Hope. Plan. And remember that God is in control.

Surrender your life into His hands.

I love school!