Death of a Dream
O Christ, in whom the final fulfillment of all hope is held secure.
I bring to you now the weathered fragments of my former dreams, the broken pieces of my expectations, the rent patches of hopes worn thin, the shards of some shattered image of life as I once thought it would be.
What I so wanted has not come to pass. I invested my hopes in desires that returned only sorrow and frustration. Those dreams, like glimmering faerie feasts, could not sustain me,
and in my head I know that you are sovereign even over this – over my tears, my confusion, and my disappointment. But I still feel, in this moment, as id I have been abandoned, as if you do not care that these hopes have collapsed to rubble.
And yet I know this is not so. You are the sovereign of my sorrow. You apprehend a wider sweep with wiser eyes than mine. My history bears the fingerprints of grace. You were always faithful, though I could not always trace quick evidence of your presence in my pain, yet did you remain at work, lurking in the wings, sifting all my splinterings for bright embers that might be breathed into more eternal dreams.
I have seen so oft in retrospect, how you had not neglected me, but had, with a master’s care, flared my desire like silver in a crucible to burn away some lessor longing, and bring about your better vision.
So let me remain tender now, to how you would teach me. My disappointments reveal so much about my own agenda for my life, and the ways I quietly demand that it should play out: free of conflict, free of pain, free of want.
My dreams are all so small.
Your bigger purpose has always been for my greatest good, that I would day-to-day be fashioned into a more fit vessel for the indwelling of your Spirit, and molded into a more compassionate emissary of your coming Kingdom. And you, in love, will use all means to shape my heart into those perfect forms.
So let this disappointment do its work.
My truest hopes have never been failed, they have merely been buried beneath the shoveled muck of disillusion, or encased in a carapace of self-serving desire. It is only false hopes that are brittle, shattering like shells of thing glass, to reveal the diamond hardness of the unshakeable eternal hopes within. So shake and scatter all that would hinder my growth, O God.
Unmask all false hopes, that my one true hope might shine out unclouded and undimmed. So let me be tutored by this new disappointment. Let me listen to its holy whisper, that I might release at last these lesser dreams. That I might embrace the better dreams you dream for me, and for your people, and for your kingdom, and for your creation. Let me join myself to these, investing all hope in the one hope that will never come undone or betray those who place their trust in it. Teach me to hope, O Lord, always and only in you.
You are the King of my collapse. You answer not what I demand, but what I do not even know to ask.
Now take this dream, this husk, this chaff of my desire, and give it back reformed and remade according to your better vision, or do not give it back at all. Here in the ruins of my wrecked expectation, let me make this confession:
Not my dreams, O Lord, not my dreams, but yours, be done.
Amen.