The Day I Died

I died the other day. No, it wasn't suddenly. It had been happening slowly. It started the day I stopped dreaming. You see, my dreams were too big and I was inadequate. Or so I thought and so I had been told. "You're too shy. You're too sick. You're too depressed. You're too broke..."

So I gave up those dreams. And I stopped dreaming altogether. That's the day I died. The fire that burned so brightly through sickness and despair was snuffed out. After all, isn't it time I started living a little more "realistically?"

But then I wonder, in deeming my dreams too big, am I making my God too small? I mean, "realistically" I couldn't have done half the things that I've done in my life. That's the miracle of God. He helps us do things that we couldn't possibly do on our own...

I died the other day. But I know a God that can bring dead things back to life and accomplish the impossible. Even dreams that are too big for lives that are completely inadequate.

Work That Matters

I have found in life that the greatest blessings come from friends. I have been blessed by their presence and encouraged by their words. So many times, I feel as though I am so broken and a burden to others. But then I realize that we are all broken. We are all wounded in some way. And we all need someone to carry us at some point in our lives. We get through life with the help of our friends and family. We carry each other through the hard times and rejoice together during the good times.

I've been wrestling lately with the purpose of my life. What do I do with the life I've been given? How should I spend my years? How do I spend the rest of this year? And I've come to think that my purpose is not going to be found in my job. My purpose is found in relationships. It is found in encouraging my friends with drive-by hugs and notes out of the blue.

I was reading Frederick Buechner's novel Brendan. At the end of the book, he steps back to look at the rag-tag group of Brendan's friends that had followed him on his journeys...

"Pushing down hard with his fists on the table-top [Gildas] heaved himself up to where he was standing. For the first time we saw he wanted one leg. It was gone from the knee joint down. He was hopping sideways to reach for his stick in the corner when he lost his balance. He would have fallen in a heap if Brendan hadn't leapt forward and caught him."

"'I'm as crippled as the dark world,' Gildas said."

"'If it comes to that, which one of us isn't my dear?' Brendan said."

"Gildas with but one leg. Brendan sure he'd misspent his whole life entirely. Me that had left my wife to follow him and buried our only boy. The truth of what Brendan said stopped all our mouths. We was cripples all of us. For a moment or two there was no sound but the bees."

"'To lend each other a hand when we're falling,' Brendan said. 'Perhaps that's the only work that matters in the end.'"

Indeed, perhaps that's the work that matters in the end...