I have recently been working through some thoughts regarding dreams, hope and faith. How does one walk through the process of dreaming and hoping while keeping ones faith and hope in the right place? In my recent processing I came to a realization. It is hard for me to dream and hope.
As I was reading back through some journal entries from before I met Mandy I saw a lot of things I wrote about that I had dreamed about and hoped for. Things I believed God was showing me and had given to me to pray about. None of these things came to fruition. I ask why and didn’t initially come up with a reason. Having no reason adds fuel to the fire of disappoint from dreams and hope.
How does one walk in faith when you have a mounting pile of unfulfilled dreams and abandoned hope pilling up before you? Often times for me you don’t. You just stop putting faith in hopes and dreams. Then as you stop putting faith in them you stop believing in them. As you stop believing in them you don’t want to have them and a dream goes from giving one something to hope for into something to hold at a distance and regret.
It was in this process of thinking I have found myself dappling in for some time. Faithless, hopeless and wishing I was dreamless. But I am not. I have a dream. Not a small one or something I am even close to being able to do right now. This is why this dream requires an element of hope to support it life as a dream. Hope that somehow some way it can happen.
It will die there or at least will stay dormant there as it has for years until somehow something else is added to the mix. It is like having a seed planted in soil. It will always stay a seed and may even decay and rot so it becomes a part of the soil unless something is added to the mix. For the soil and seed picture you need water, for the dream and hope picture you need faith.
If you don’t water the seed correctly the very thing the seed and the soil need can actually be a part of the destruction. Faith can also do the same to the hope and the dream as I have experienced. It is not the act of having faith that is the down fall as I thought. I had bought into the thought that I have put faith into these other things and I believed in them and for them to occur and look what happened, nothing. Faith produces nothing. That is what my track record shows me.
I recently began to have a revelation about this faith, hope and dreaming thing. I discovered a tendency in my life. I have a tendency to put my faith in the hope or the dream. It is like expecting the seed and the soil to produce the water needed. When I look at my life and all the things I have but my faith in. I see one thing lacking, a correct placement of faith.
Where should one place their faith? How does one place their faith correctly? Is this something we should inherently know or are we supposed to learn as we go? What about being trained in the ways of placing our faith?
All these questions have been working through me as I have worked through my thoughts and as I began to write this blog. Have I come up with any answers? Yes. Do I have it all figured out so I can start walking in the right faith? No.
At some point in life the inherent ability of a child to have faith, to hope and to dream was lost or at least polluted. Now I have to work at faith and to retrain myself in living out faith. I need others to show me and teach me what it looks like and how it works. It is like a muscle that hasn’t been used because of an injury. It needs to be used and exercised so it can become strong and work correctly again.
Back to the question of where do we put our faith. I have seen and heard a very clear message lately. A message I have been reading about in my devotion time. A message I have heard and seen in the lives of people around me. God is the one I need to put my faith in.
