My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
2 Corinthians 12:9
We can’t talk about dreaming with God without discussing what to do when our dreams don’t come true. What do we do when our life plans don’t work out the way we thought they would or even the way we thought God wanted them to? What do we do when we feel like somehow God has left us in the dark?
I know we touched on this a little bit back in chapter 4, but I want to take it a step further in this chapter. The hardest part about trusting God with the dreams of our hearts is understanding that every dream we dream isn’t necessarily going to come true. In fact, dreaming with God is risky heart business. Some of you have been completely sideswiped by life. Maybe one of your dreams has completely fallen through. Maybe you’ve experienced deep loss. Maybe the life you had been standing on has been completely swept away. Maybe you are frustrated by the lot God has chosen for you. Maybe you want something different—or you think you want something different. Maybe you’ve been praying for a dream and it’s just not happening. Maybe it’s clear it’s never going to happen.
We’re just going to sit in that tension a bit here in this chapter because we’ve all experienced some disappointment, hurt, or loss in regard to the dreams of our hearts. And we must acknowledge this. We must look to God for comfort. We must feel the weight in order to feel the hope of God, the peace of God, and the presence of God. We’re going to talk about the detours, delays, and dreams that don’t come true, as well as the invitation to seek God through it all instead of defaulting to despair, discouragement, or even dancing out of step with God’s plans for us.
The Greatest Example
The greatest example we can turn to is Jesus’s life. His life, His dance with God, was anything but roses and butterflies. But He lived with deep joy and sweet contentment, never in a hurry, always stopping to love somebody. He did His work with enthusiasm and peace. He never fretted over the future or analyzed the past. His dance included possibly the most excruciating pain known to humankind—crucifixion. He agonized in prayer to God over the “whys” of having to face the cross. He felt left in the dark. He felt maybe even abandoned by God. Only God, His Father, could see the beauty that the ashes would bring. Jesus’s pain became our greatest deliverance, our pathway to eternal joy. His dance of life became the heartbeat to our dances through life.
His dream of doing God’s work included hard moments, deep valleys, and dark nights. But He pressed on and trusted God’s heart. He trusted God’s love. All He wanted to do was “be about [His] Father’s business” (Luke 2:49 KJV). His dance was entirely about His Father’s business. That’s what He lived and loved for. While knowing Christ endured hard valleys in life doesn’t fix our pain, it’s comforting to know He understands it completely.
Jesus’s greatest pain became His greatest mission. His pain became our gain. And God will use your pain to be your greatest mission. He will use your pain to help someone else. You will be able to use your pain and lost dreams to help and encourage someone, to put light into someone else’s life.
I penned the following in my journal a while back when I was feeling the tension of dreams delayed and detoured.
If I wasn’t weak, I wouldn’t know His strength.
If everything in my life was perfect, I wouldn’t know the power of prayer.
If I didn’t need Him, I would never know His love.
If I was always confident, bold, and strong, I would never need to ask God for help.
If I never knew tears, I would never know He’s the One who can wipe them away.
If I never had a tough day, I would never rejoice in the good ones.
If I never knew fatigue, I would never know His power.
If I always knew just what to say, I would never need His Spirit.
If I always knew what step to take next, I would never need the Helper.
If I always felt at peace, I would never experience His healing.
If I knew exactly what to do with my life, I would never know His direction for what I was made for.
If I never ached for a dream to come true, I would never know that nothing is impossible for God.
If I knew all the answers, I would never know the delight of His Word.
If my ballet technique had been perfect, I would have never known the reward of hard work.
If parenting and marriage were easy, I would have never surrendered them to God.
If I weren’t a tiny bit on the emotional and introspective side, I would never need time in my Savior’s presence, and I would miss out on knowing His love and grace.
You see, we all wish our weaknesses and hard moments away. But without them, we wouldn’t need a relationship with Him.
What about you? What in your life has pointed you to God? To a closer relationship with Him? There were times, especially on this writing road, when I ran into one detour or delay after another. But I’ve learned that detours and delays often redirect us back to God.
His detours often become points of reflection, of evaluating and examining our lives before Him. Delays lead us to press into Him. Both become springboards to a deeper walk with Him. I’m not saying I love detours and delays or that they are easy by any means, but just acknowledging that they’re part of dreaming with God is important to our journeys. We’ll also experience moments of disappointment along our dreaming journeys. But as we embrace His love for us, we begin to see that often the disappointments are part of the detours; they lead to the beautiful flow of God’s direction for our lives and a deeper relationship with Him in which we completely depend on Him.
Our human nature is to do life without God. Sometimes it feels easier to do what we want to do the way we want to do it. It’s simpler to just make things happen, whatever the cost. But there’s beauty in dependence on the Lord. When we depend on God, we live differently.
Dancing with the Lord through life isn’t necessarily about fulfilling our dreams; it’s about deepening our dependence on Him. When dreams don’t come true, we can count on the One who guides us. The detours, delays, and disappointments become signposts to point the way to Him.
I love this definition of depend: “to rely for support, maintenance, help.”1 In our dependence on God, we can rely on Him fully for support, heart maintenance, and help. Don’t we all need heart maintenance sometimes? I know I do! When dreams fall through, when delays and detours bombard us, when disappointments envelop us, we can always run to the Lord for heart maintenance.
Just as our natural inclination is to default to despair when things aren’t turning out the way we want, we can easily default to plans of our own instead of seeking God for His plans for us. Opportunities come at us and ideas grow inside us, but how many of us tend to go for them now and pray about them later? We jump into things before we consult the Lord. I can be a jumper for sure. Sometimes I go after an opportunity or open door before I talk to God about it. I jump, I leap, and then at some point I become stressed. I realize I defaulted to saying yes without seeking God’s best for me. I long for my default mode to be one that seeks God first, above everything else. Sometimes it may seem unproductive or silly or like a waste of time to slow down to earnestly seek God in a situation. But it’s in the slowing down and the seeking that we find divine direction, clarity, and wisdom.
Dreaming with God Is Worth It
God makes things good and right. According to Isaiah 40:4, “The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (KJV). In those moments when our dreams slide downhill, we can know that when the Word of God is in our hearts, our steps will not slide (see Ps. 37:31). Our Father in heaven sees all our troubles, loves us through them all, and recognizes the grand picture of the dance of our lives. I’m not going to say we should sweep our troubles under the rug or that everything’s going to be okay or that we should simply move on. No, sometimes we will need to accept that it’s okay to feel hurt and disappointment. And when we do, we can find comfort in the Lord.
When we feel we’re in the dark and wonder what the next step is, we can always know that the best move is to seek the Lord. All of us have experienced hard things. We all know the hurt of a dream that’s gone downhill. How we react comes down to our theology. Our theology is what we believe about God. If we believe God is good, then our hearts will rest in where we are in our dreaming journeys. If we believe He is at work, then we’ll know deep down that our dreaming journeys will work out in more beautiful ways than we ever could imagine. Sometimes it’s just really hard to get our hearts in line with our theology. While we’ll always have to sit in that tension of not knowing how our dreams will work out, we can always know God is leading.
One thing I’m sure of is that the truth of God’s Word is God’s love language right straight to our hearts. Our hearts are designed to hear the Word, to know the truth, and to find hope in His divine Word. We need the Word of God. It speaks to our hearts in ways human words can’t.
My soul is weary with sorrow;
strengthen me according to your word. (Ps. 119:28)
Ultimately, God’s Word is the strongest foundation for our dreaming journeys and our lives. When dreams collide, crash, or completely dissolve, God’s Word still stands. He has truths and words just for our dreaming hearts. His Word settles us like nothing else can. These hearts of ours, they can feel like untamed horses—wild and jumpy and restless. His Word meets us in our restlessness and calms our storms. It’s a direct line to His heart. And combining His Word with prayer keeps our hearts in rhythm with His heart.
Sometimes dreams are simply not going to come true. But despite that reality, we know God still reigns in our lives. And the intimacy we find with God along the way makes dreaming worth the disappointments. The giddiness, the joy, the impossibilities, the hope, and the fun make dreaming with God worth it all.
Those you and God moments of heart maintenance are what it’s all about. Press into the Lord, sweet one. Know that He has your delays, your detours, and your disappointments. He knows them. He has you. Just be held by Him in those moments. Just be held.
Dreams Come True and Dreams Come Undone
My sister Katie and her husband, Reece, struggled with infertility for three years. Although I could see the hurt and questions in Katie’s eyes throughout the struggle, she never complained. She just kept praying. My siblings and I had a growing crew of kiddos—all boys. Brian and I have three boys, my oldest brother and sister-in-law have three boys, and my other brother and sister-in law have five. Count ’em, five! And the youngest are twin boys. So my parents have eleven grandsons. I often lose track of how many nephews I have. My sweet sister quietly trusted God with her dream for a baby—and it wasn’t happening. I struggled to know how to encourage her. Half of me wanted to spur her on and assure her that the Lord would be faithful and His timing would be perfect. But the other half of me questioned if I would be giving her false hope. None of us knew if they would be able to have a baby. So I tried to hug her a lot. And all of us prayed. I can’t imagine Katie and Reece’s angst and even grief over what may never come. Having a baby was a dream that I’m sure felt delayed, on hold, and even completely impossible at times.
But they continued to pray. They continued to pray not so much for a baby, but for God’s very best for them. They continued to believe that His plans for them were not just good, but amazing. The way they quietly pressed into the Lord during this time ministered to me and to many others.
Typically, when someone in my family announces they are expecting a baby, we get all kinds of loud and dramatic. There’s lots of screaming, jumping up and down, and hugging, and the happy couple tells the big story of how it all came about. Those baby announcements are some of my favorite memories with my family.
So when Katie announced that she and Reece were finally expecting, she was anticipating a full-on dance and screaming party. But on that beautiful summer evening in Crested Butte, Colorado, with our entire family gathered around a dinner table at our favorite Mexican restaurant for my dad’s birthday (well, we had two tables . . . the eleven grandsons had their own), no one danced or screamed. Instead, we were all speechless and teary. We all kind of stared at her and Reece, totally stunned. Stunned by God. Stunned by His timing. Stunned by their continual faith in Him. She was probably a little disappointed by our initial reactions, but after the shock wore off, we laughed and hugged and squealed. Then we all stayed up way too late dreaming about this precious little gem who was getting ready to make their way into the world. And we basked in God’s faithfulness.
The story gets even sweeter. Further into Katie’s pregnancy, when it was time for them to reveal the gender of the baby, my entire family gathered at my parents’ house for the big reveal. We all held a balloon with a color representing what gender we thought the baby would be—pink for a girl or blue for a boy. There was a good mixture of guesses. Would it be the twelfth grandson or the first granddaughter?
Reece and Katie had a big box sealed up with balloons inside, and when they opened the box, a mass of pink balloons floated out. All I remember is Katie jumping up and down and all of us screaming. Pure joy. Pure faithfulness of God. Pure sweetness of God. Not that we wouldn’t have been excited if it was a boy, but it was so sweet that God gave Katie and Reece the first (and currently the only) baby girl after all they had been through.
And Reece and Katie’s little girl, who is now almost one, is a constant reminder that God hears. He’s good. He’s faithful.
When our dreams don’t come true or when they seem completely impossible, we can turn to the Lord and trust His ways. My heart hurts for those of you who are experiencing a dream undone right now. I want to say all the right things and encourage you in the right way, but all I know is that I don’t know the answers. However, I’m inspired by the way Katie and Reece sought the Lord when they felt hopeless. And I think stories like theirs remind us to do the same when our dreams threaten to undo us. We all will have dreams that don’t come true. We all will experience long waits, seemingly unanswered prayers, and heartache. These things are part of our journey of dreaming with God.
But remember that God knows our every desire and dream. He knows our fear and pain and disappointment. If God feels about us the way I felt about watching my baby sister wait and wonder about God’s plans for her, He is the sweetest God. He takes on your pain, waiting, and unfulfilled dreams. He feels the weight of these things along with you. He may not always make your dreams come true, but He will help you walk through the heartbreak.
There’s this little gem of a verse in Luke 1 that says, “Your prayer has been heard” (v. 13). An angel of the Lord said this to Zechariah upon giving him the news that his prayers for a child had been heard and God had faithfully answered them.
Whatever prayer requests you have been bringing to God, know that He hears you. He hears every single request. Every cry, every appeal, every wish for others, every prayer for help with the habits and hang-ups of your heart, for big dreams and practical things . . . all of it. He hears. It takes faith to believe that He hears. Sometimes you may feel like you’re throwing out prayers but not seeing any evidence that God hears them. Know that as you journey through this dance of life, God hears. Keep praying in faith.
It’s in the praying that we find God’s peace. While we may still want answers, His peace is immeasurable. We can know His peace even when we don’t have His answers or when we don’t like His answers. But through our praying and seeking, we discover He’s faithful, always listening, and always in control. He carries us. He holds us. He’s our strong foundation when the foundations of our dreams crumble.
So why keep dreaming, hoping, and praying when dreams sometimes don’t come true? Because this life is a mixture of dreams come true and dreams undone, and seeking God in and through it is where we find the comfort and healing we need for our dream-hungry hearts throughout the journey.
While I wish every dream came true, I’m thankful we have the God of the universe to walk us through the dreams undone. While the journey isn’t fun or pretty or easy, He keeps our souls dancing when they feel like calling it quits. We can still get mad, sad, and frustrated when life doesn’t go our way. It’s okay to feel those things. But we have Someone we can bring all those feelings to. He meets us where we are. He tends to our hearts. He ministers to our souls.
Whether dreams come true or dreams come undone, we have a constant Source, an ever-present Encourager, and One who continues to pick us up. I’m so thankful we have a Savior who jumps up and down with us and delights with us when dreams come true and who holds us and carries us when dreams come undone. Keep pressing into the Lord, sweet one.
Prayer, Scripture, and Reflection
for Your Dreaming Heart
Lord, You know the delays, detours, and disappointments in my own dreaming journey. You know every single one. Thank You that I can run to You when I feel the tension and weight of those things. Thank You that Your Word constantly points me in the right direction and that You are shaping me and guiding me through every delay and detour. Give me a hunger to know You in a deeper way, to seek You, and to trust Your ways. Give me confident faith in who You are and in Your faithfulness. When my dreams don’t come true, may I confidently step toward You and desperately depend on You. Thank You for meeting me at every stop and in every dark place. Thank You for being the light of my life. Thank You that Your grace and Your presence are enough for me in my own dance through life. You are all I need.
“Your word, LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations.” Psalm 119:89–90
“I am your servant; give me discernment that I may understand your statutes.” Psalm 119:125
“The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” Psalm 119:130
“Direct my footsteps according to your word.” Psalm 119:133
1. When in your life have you felt like you landed in a detour, delay, or disappointment in regard to the dreams of your heart?
2. When a dream falls through, what is your default mode? To go and make it happen? To seek the Lord? To do something else?
3. Describe a time when your pain became a pathway to drawing closer to the Lord or a time when good came out of a bad situation.
4. How might your heart need some maintenance in the Lord today? What things need realignment? What truths need reinforcing?
5. What will you choose to believe about God when your dreams fall through?
1. Dictionary.com, s.v. “depend,” accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.dictionary.com/browse/depend?s=t.