Tanya and I were home again after our Alaska trip, still trying to convince our bodies that Texas time is the time that matters. We were listening to classical guitar on YouTube.
One song led to another.
Later we watched Song Sung Blue, the story of two ordinary people with rather extraordinary dreams. They wanted to sing. They wanted an audience. They wanted, I suppose, some version of what so many people who enter the entertainment world want:
To make it.
The movie brought tears to my eyes.
Perhaps partly because I have known those people.
Years ago, when I worked in broadcasting and around the entertainment industry, I encountered plenty of talented people carrying enormous dreams. Some made it. Many didn’t. Some got tantalizingly close.
Life has a way of happening while we are pursuing something else.
A marriage.
A child.
A wrong turn.
An addiction.
An illness.
A financial disaster.
A door that never opens.
Sometimes no great catastrophe occurs at all. The years simply accumulate, and one day we realize the life we once imagined is no longer the life we are living.
I found myself thinking about the men I know in prison.
What did they dream about when they were boys?
Before the choices.
Before the charges.
Before the sentence.
Before somebody closed a steel door behind them.
What did they think they were going to become?
And then the questions began coming.
What did you dream of doing?
Did you pursue it?
How close did you get?
What happened?
Is any part of that dream still alive?
I don’t know where those questions are taking me. For once, I’m trying not to decide too quickly.
Then this morning another piece arrived.
Chaplain Michael Sprague wrote about Saul standing nearby while Stephen was being killed. Stephen could not have known what his gracious response might be doing inside the angry young Pharisee watching him.
And that made me think about Saul.
What were his dreams?
Saul wasn’t drifting through life. He was educated. Disciplined. Zealous. Advancing.
He later wrote:
“And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.”
—Galatians 1:14 NKJV
There is ambition in that sentence.
I advanced.
Saul was going somewhere.
And then, on the road to Damascus, he was literally stopped in his tracks.
His dream didn’t fail.
His direction changed.
Years later, the man who had been so proud of his advancement could write:
“But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ.”
—Philippians 3:7 NKJV
That caught me this morning because I know something about having my direction interrupted.
I was thirty-six when I experienced one of the defining moments of my life.
The words I heard were unmistakable:
“Paul, yield now, or I will forever leave you alone.”
Yield.
That’s an interesting word to encounter when you’re ambitious.
I had spent much of my life believing there were many things I could do. As a boy I wanted a doctorate. I used to say I didn’t care if it was a doctorate in ditch digging—I wanted one.
But my path was hardly straight.
I didn’t receive my first college degree, an associate degree, until I was thirty.
Today I am eighty-eight.
There are two doctorates.
And between that little boy’s dream and the old man writing these words is a life I could never have diagrammed.
Some dreams came true.
Some didn’t.
Some changed.
Some I abandoned.
Some, perhaps, I should have pursued and didn’t.
And some had to be surrendered because something—or Someone—was calling me in another direction.
Maybe that’s why I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the familiar advice:
Never give up on your dream.
Sometimes that’s wonderful advice.
Sometimes it may be terrible advice.
Saul needed to give up his dream.
Or perhaps more accurately, he needed to discover that the life he had so carefully prepared himself to live was not the life he had been created to live.
And there is another side to the story.
Stephen died without seeing what Saul would become.
Perhaps some of the greatest things accomplished through our lives are things we will never know we accomplished.
So I’m wandering this morning.
No conclusions.
Just questions.
What did you dream of becoming?
How close did you get?
What stopped you?
What changed you?
What did you achieve only to discover it wasn’t enough?
What dream did you have to surrender?
And perhaps the question that interests me most:
Who would you have become if everything had gone according to your plan?
I don’t know where all of this is going.
For much of my life, thoughts would come and I wouldn’t chase them. Eventually they disappeared. I suppose dreams can disappear that way too.
These days, when a thought comes walking past, I am more inclined to get up and follow it for a while.
So I’m going to follow this one.
Let’s see where it goes.
Just wandering.
Spiritual Wanderings 