I’ve had three dreams for my professional life since I graduated college: first, I wanted to be a professional musician. Second, I wanted to plant a church that would preach the gospel faithfully. Third, and most recently, I wanted to be a successful writer and share my family’s testimony. These have been my life dreams for the past decade and a half.
And to be honest, I haven’t been doing especially well in any of them.
My career in music was brief and rather unspectacular. I wrote some good songs and played some good shows but never was able to attract interest from record labels as I had hoped and maybe even expected. The church I had planted survived for only two years before closing down…well, two years and five months, but who’s counting? And it appears less and less likely that a publisher is going to pick up my memoir – perhaps that is a bit premature, and a bit cynical, but who knows.
So that’s it, three dreams, three failures.
As a result, I have spent untold hours trying to puzzle out why I was unable to be successful in any of these endeavors. Without trying to sound conceited, I don’t believe it was an issue of skill or talent. Perhaps there is something to be said for the fact that I never really threw myself into these fields as more successful people usually do. Although I love music, I hated the music scene, which dulled my motivation as an aspiring musician. While planting the church, I was also struggling with my wife’s cancer diagnosis, which was somewhat distracting, as you can imagine. So perhaps a lack of effort contributed somewhat to my lack of success.
But one idea that I return to time and time again is that of chance and fate, that maybe it was just never meant to be. It had little to do with talent or connections or anything circumstantial, just that I wasn’t meant to be any of these things, too bad, so sad, that’s fate. Now, this belief is supposed to make a person feel better about themselves, but not for me.
As a Christian, I don’t believe in fate and chance, only that God directs my life with a plan that He forged long ago, supposedly in infinite wisdom and in infinite love. And so, it would also logically follow that it was not fate but God Himself who had a hand in my inability to be successful in any of these dreams.
As much as I would like to ignore the thought, perhaps God did not want me to realize my life’s dreams.
It reminds me of this clip from King of the Hill where Bobby wants to be a husky child model, and his father refuses to allow it.
That’s me – I wanted to be a husky child model, and God wouldn’t let me…or something to that effect.
That has been a hard thought to confront.
After all, there was nothing inherently wrong with any of these dreams, as if I wanted to become a successful drug dealer or serial killer. And in all three of these ambitions, my ultimate goal was always to put God first and to encourage other people. Why would God have a problem with that? Why would God not want me to live out my dream? Does He not love me or want what’s best for me; is that it??
