Dreams

God gives us dreams a size too big so that we can grow in them.
Author Unknown

What do you dream of? When I was a child, I wanted to save the world from pollution by shutting down all the factories. Wouldn't it be nice if it were that simple? My father quickly put that down by reminding me to face reality and that if you shut down all the factories then people would be out of work and the products wouldn't be available etc etc etc. I was crushed. Obviously stopping pollution is a much more difficult problem than I had realized.

That was a dream that was a size too big. I was only a child and didn't understand the way the world worked. It still is a dream of mine to stop pollution but now I understand better what is involved. I have grown into a bigger person, and if that was my major goal in life I would be in a much better position to find a solution now than I was then. It is unfortunate that so many children start out with great dreams only to have their family, teacher, priest etc tell them that it is an impossible or impractical idea and so they completely give up on it.

God gives us dreams a size too big so that we can grow in them. If my dream was to buy a new car, or to get through the day, how much growing would I be motivated to do? For one thing, I would just be thinking about myself; probably about how lousy my current car was or all my problems at work or at home. I can't grow when all I think about is myself and my own problems.

Growth happens when we have a dream that we don't right now have a solution to. The growth is in the discovery of the best way to solve a problem, and the more challenging it is, the more we grow. The most growth occurs when we have a dream that is so large that it affects many other people besides ourselves. Then, we have expanded our horizons significantly, which makes the dream both more meaningful and more powerful. Life is about growth. And that's why God gives us dreams and desires that we can't see the way to fulfilling yet.