I am the exactly kind of person who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable for life to become something amazing for everyone. After all, you call the shots on your own life, right?
Uhmm, nope. Nope times a million.
This is not logical thinking. I know this. Yet in my world, until someone shocks me with the cold water of reality, I will not abandon my dandelion-and-sunflower bubble. Everything’s just golden.
Until it’s not.
I have been stricken with the inability to stop destruction from crumbling all around me. And you have, too.
We as humans cannot stop bad things from happening. It is impossible. We can’t stop earthquakes, cancer (yet), injustice, crime, heartbreak. These are things that just happen, things that hold the power to ruin someone’s life if you give it the power to.
They are all things our pea-brains cannot even fathom until they actually happen to us.
For instance, take relationships. Broken relationships. Crushes. Heartbreak. You can hear all about them, imagine what it might be like for the people involved and how much it might hurt, but until it happens to you that first time, until that first crush shatters your heart into a tiny million pieces, you cannot fully accept the pain attached. Not until it becomes your pain.
Now flip the spectrum. Think about your dreams.
I have many. I’ve shared a great deal of them with you, if you’ve read my blog before. My hopeful aspirations of becoming a NYT bestselling authoress, going to a highly-rated university for creative writers, and falling in love are among my many dreams.
But now that college creeps closer and closer, I’ve begun to take a closer look at schools and the numbers attached to them.
And I’m starting to feel a little less hopeful.
Money isn’t really something you typically concern yourself with when you’re a kid. You don’t think about how much things cost in a reasonable fashion, and you don’t always imagine where the money might come from. You just know it was always there. Or maybe for you, it wasn’t. But that is beside the point.
But when you get a little older, and you have to worry about car insurance, and gas, and clothes and other expenses, you start to think about looking for a job. Fun, am I right?
Again, I’m not.
It’s all a bit of a cultural shock to me, this money thing. Having to think about making my own money. Knowing that someday, I won’t be able to rely on my parents’ money anymore.
The two things I have to hold on to through all of this is God and my dreams. That’s virtually it. Without my dreams, and without some semblance of how to accomplish them, I wouldn’t have a clue about how I want to spend the rest of my life. The dream of being a writer is literally it. That’s my only plan. Not really sure how it will come to be, but I know that things will work themselves out, one way or another.
And that’s the hard part. Giving yourself away to God, willing to be led blindly by faith. It’s unfamiliar, terrifying, messy, and almost always tear-filled somewhere along the way.
But it’s worth it. Every second. The little faith-led victories in my life thus far have proven to be so.
But it’s often the bitter things that I’ve seen
That compliment the ending.
“Valentina” by The Hunts (song)
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