Need Some Motivation for your adult life today ? Dreams Come True...

Sometimes in this adult life, it appears as though trouble and suffer head never cease. Like our entire lives have been crammed into a bottle and shaken until we don’t know up from down. When we are eventually set on our feet, we are so dizzy from all the shaking we find it impossible to put one foot in front of the other. And because we are suckers for punishment we keep going, keep dreaming, keep wanting more from life even when our chance of success is statistically dismal. Somewhere in the middle of this journey, the point where the rose-tinted glasses have fallen off and nothing but the stark reality squares us in the face, comes the darkness.

The deeper into our dreams we wade, the darker the path becomes and the temptation to crawl our way out grows stronger. This was me last week. Seven days of pure misery. Each day worse than the other and no matter what I did there was no shaking it off. No encouragement from my friends or loved ones made any difference. Their words fell into the bottomless pit of my despair until they faded into nothing.

My problem was nothing and everything at the same time. Nothing, because I convinced myself that I was nothing and would always be nothing. Everything, because my self-condemnation fell like rain, dampening everything within reach. Each day, I examined a dream and punished myself with images of never fulfilling it. In the physical, I put on clothes and make up and occasionally a smile. In the battleground of my mind, I was bloody, dirty and desolate from warring against myself.

At some point in that month long week, I started bargaining with myself. “I’ll abandon the dream,” I told myself. “If wanting it hurts this much then it isn’t worth it, this pain can never be worth it.”

And because I’d imprinted my hopes and my dreams on my heart, the separation was brutal. There wasn’t enough water in my body for the tears I shed. Mourning is not designed to be fun. At some point – as I cried into my bathroom towel so no one would hear me – I heard something.

– Now, we approach faith in different ways but the name I have for the voice I heard was God. It was tiny enough for me to doubt I heard it yet strong enough to make me lean into it. The sentence was simple – “I am still here.”

I am still here.

As in, never left. As in always been. Still here even though I just gave up. Still here even though the pain was too much.

Still. Here.

It was a comfort, but it surely didn’t wash clean the pain. The loss of my dreams still stung. The hopelessness of my situation still glaring. But I’ve learnt that when God is trying to get my attention there is no fighting it, try as I might. Every line I read; every Instagram post I checked out after that moment was designed to get my attention. The first didn’t soothe the ache - it barely scratched the surface - but as I gave into God’s set up, the rope around my neck loosened. It let up inch by inch until I stumbled upon - or was guided to - a video clip. The message was this. “Think not of yourself as a person with an assignment, purpose or dream. Think about yourself as THE assignment, THE purpose and THE dream.”

I abandoned my bargain the minute the weight of these words settled in my chest. It is selfish to believe our hopes and dreams are random and as such begin and end with us. The mysteries of this world are endless and our interconnectedness to each other’s journeys is mind boggling. Endless dotted lines from one person to the other, invisible but tangible. The fight is in staying the course. It is in hanging on the belief that no matter the opposition or blatant hopelessness, those lines that attach one person to the other must be drawn. The connections must be made. Somewhere out there someone is waiting on you. Waiting for you to sing that song, to write that book, to start that business. They don’t even know it yet. The message I stumbled on first aired in 2017 and found me in 2021 with full relevance, and became the little miracle I needed at a time when I expected it the least.

I am learning that, yes, there are rules to reaching one’s goals: hard work, resilience, discipline and grit to name a few. Achieving dreams big or small will never happen by accident. It will mean long hours. It will mean working hard even with no validation. It will mean darkness and a heaviness that sometimes won’t let up.

But this word that came to me in the moment of my darkest despair brought such light that it made me think: what if the signs of success are not, "Bright Lights and Bling Bling"? What if those only come after we have learnt to find the light when we are in our darkest places?

What if the recognition is not the victory - but that the victory is in these small moments, where we remember that the reason for success is big enough and real enough to overcome the discouragement that comes along the way?

Maybe, just maybe, these are the signs we should look out for - and not just our name in the stars. Maybe the struggle is the story.

Because, in the story, there is hope, and hope is contagious.

Whew, our hearts! Did this piece encourage you? Let me know in the comments section.