We all have hopes and dreams and I can tell you from experience that it can be a hard thing to watch a dream die.  But have you ever considered letting your dreams die?

Let me be a little more specific.  Have you ever considered that you might need to let one dream die so that a greater dream can live?  Or that the very thing that’s holding you back in life might be what you are holding on to?

Dreams are Good

I’m going to talk a little about some practical experience that my wife and I had recently, but the principles apply in so many areas of our lives.  We all have so many dreams – some old dreams from our childhood, some crushed dreams, some dreams we’re working on, and maybe even some dreams that are bigger than our lives.

There’s nothing wrong with having these dreams – particularly if they are God-given.  In fact, I believe that dreaming is part of our being formed in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-31).  But let’s be honest with ourselves, sometimes our dreams are in conflict with each other.  And sometimes our dreams are in conflict with reality.  What do we do then?

Know What’s Most Important

My wife and I had a baby very recently (hours ago as I write this) and, like Aaron Shaver (@shaversrazor) wrote in a guest post here on bdentzy.com, we had a birth plan and some ideals.  We had everything worked out the way that we hoped it would happen.  Unfortunately things didn’t go exactly as planned

I’m not going to get into all of the details, but some things came up that required us to reevaluate our plan and to make tradeoff decisions about our dreams and what was most important.  Quite honestly, we had to choose between some dreams .

Thankfully, we had the counsel of excellent medical staff and great family support (Proverbs 26:4) and our decisions were pretty simple to make (simple, not easy).  We had our dream of the perfect birth with all of the details but we had to choose between kissing some parts of our overall childbirth dream “good-bye” or missing out completely.

Healthy baby, Healthy mommy.

The point of this whole pregnancy exercise is to have a baby.  And, ideally, there’s a mommy and daddy left when it’s all over, too.  So when our decisions became about choosing between details or missing the point of having a healthy baby and a healthy mommy, it was simple.

Simple, Not Easy

After planning and waiting so many months and days for God’s best in our little baby girl, the choice was simple – we needed to do what it takes to have a healthy baby and mommy.  We knew we were making the right decisions but that didn’t make them easy.  We still had to watch some of our dreams die.  But I can tell you (one healthy baby and a healthy mommy later) that we absolutely made the right call.  We didn’t miss the point of it all, though we let a few details go.

It was totally worth it.  She’s beautiful!

Just One Example

This is just one example.  There are so many ways that we might need to let a dream die so that a bigger dream can live.  Maybe we need to let go of a dream from our past.  Maybe we need to mourn a dream that’s already dead but we’re still trying to resuscitate.  Maybe we need to do the hard work of looking what’s most important so that we can make the right call if we need to.

I’m still dreaming even though sometimes I watch a dream or part of a dream die.  How about you?