Skeletons of Roses

I have been hunting.

And it wasn't until a few days ago that I finally caught a glimpse of my target.

I have been actively searching for meaning, purpose and direction, well..., every day of my life after I realized that playing Barbie's was not a job, and would never be more than exercise for my imagination.

It was at that point that I met reality, and her and I have been at odds ever since.

This last week has been one of the most stressful in my life, and one in which I created not with a paint brush but one that was inked out of fake smiles, sweaty handshakes, and stumbling first steps.

And I am not complaining. I am compelled. Compelled to lower my gun. Determined to give myself some time to get out of the line of my own fire.

These last few weeks I have been in a strange head space. That same place I visit when I find myself praying to get sick just so that I can get a day off to lie in bed.

When you hope to get sick, you can safely bet that you are already diseased in some capacity.

And it was in the morning mirror as I was splashing water across my face that I saw my target, it was me.

I still can't understand why I am out for myself. It's almost as if I am tracking my own footprints, in hopes that when I finally stumble upon myself sitting in my office chair pouring over emails and spreadsheets, that I will pull the proverbial trigger. I will let myself off the hook, I will hand myself a hall pass to the next stage of my life.

I want to fast forward the crappy parts of the movie and get to the good parts.

Friday morning, as I was reading my devotional I had an epiphany.

I think that epiphany's are just discovering something that everyone else has already figured out but you have always refused to see.

So here's to late bloomers!

I read an entry called Surrendering Your Dreams.

Every word resonated so deeply with me, that the words still echo in my head. I have these dreams for myself. I have these plans. I have these self actualized goals.

The key phrase is "I have"...

No matter what your beliefs are, whether you think God is upstairs or not, the truth is that we have little or no control over our dreams coming true. We can be the authors of them, but the final chapters, well those are beyond our control. We just can't make life look like we want it to. We are powerless in the now.

Sure, we can pursue our dreams, we can move to new cities, make connections with people who can catapult us, and we can create better art, finish starts, practice, devote, and emerge a new and improved version of our former selves.

But without opportunity, which we have to just wait to find us, we can not make anything happen in our lives.

They just happen. Like some stroke of random chance?

Some choose to think everything is chance, and some people choose to believe that everything is planned, coordinated, designed from the beginning of time- we just aren't the Planner.

I am somewhere in between.

I believe in divine chance.

Right now it is spring in Nashville. The roses are budding, the air smells like lilac's and the air isn't heavy, but juicy, with evening rain. Just months ago all of the flowers were sticks, stubby and awkward. No one would walk down 12 South and "ooh" and "aah" over a rose garden in the late winter, who wants to admire skeletons of roses?

But hidden inside those lethargic twigs are shoots of life that will bloom in their season.

And that will be the season for admiration.

In my devotional this caught my eye,

"We don't want to be just wishful thinkers, always living in a dreamworld and never seeing anything of significance materialize. We don't want to be continually chasing after something that God is not blessing.We want to live with confidence that our hopes, dreams, and expectations are based on God-given certainty that He is behind them. If they are only our dreams and visions and not his we will experience a lifetime of unfulfillment and strife trying to make them happen."

This is profound to me, because this has been my life.

Over a glass or two of wine on date night this past week, my husband and I were calibrating and discussing how my mood and spirit had been affected by my job. He was telling me it was OK to quit. He said, "If it is going to make you this unhappy, which makes me unhappy, then I would rather you just quit."

Do you have any idea how long I have waited for him to endorse my secret thought?

I have tried to prove to him in so many ways that I am not lazy, irresponsible, and that I can be a working and productive part of our life and bank account. All of which he has never accused me of, and probably never even entertained the thought of me being. These are little insecurities that I have designed, and postmarked across my own forehead.

So you can see why my own response surprised me.

I didn't want to quit. Not now.

I said that I felt like I was supposed to be in this stage of discomfort. It sounded so weird saying. And for once I was at a loss for words. How do you explain that you think you should stay in a cell, just for your own character's sake. Talk about masochist maturity.

But it was more than that. I felt like I needed to surrender my dreams and wait on God. I need to wait. Daily.

My husband's next comment stung. He shook his head, looked at the floor and smiled- a smile where his eyes redden a little around the edges which tells me this smile isn't a happy smirk it is an ironic one, "My biggest fear, is that you will never be happy. No matter what you do. That is honestly my biggest fear."

Talk about a gut punch. I know that I am an extremely internal person, I know I am always looking for little pieces of the bigger picture so that I can try to fit together the irregular puzzle of my life to produce some sort of meaning.

But I am not generally unhappy. I am just frustrated. I have been fighting with my dreams for a long time now. And they remain dormant shoots of life inside of me. All that has ever been visible is the shoddy limbs. The vacant tree branches. The thorns. My bitterness against the system. Life's order of checks and balances.

And then I realized that I have never surrendered my dreams. I have always let myself entertain the idea of an alternate life that I will someday live.

And because of that I am spending most of my life as a skeleton of a shrub. I require more pruning than the average person. I am stubborn in trying to force myself to bloom.

Jesus is the master of perfect timing, and he knows when I will be ready to flourish.

If I surrender my dreams, and turn the gun away from myself and just seek peace with where I am at in life, then I give God a chance to breathe back life into dreams that I have been trying to resuscitate for years.

Stormie, the author of the devotional ties it up this way, "Our life may look barren during a time, but God is actually freeing us from anything that does not bring forth life. This process of surrendering to the Lord, especially our dreams, is called pruning. A dying of our dreams. which is painful, especially if our identity is wrapped up in them."

Ok. That right there. That is the epiphany. That is the answer.

To quote one of my favorite shows Six Feet Under, someone asks the funeral director, "Why do people have to die?", and I love his answer, "To make life important."

So why do dreams have to die?

I think you know.