Star Gazing

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

--Vincent van Gogh

It’s easy, I think, to dream things for one’s life, to make a list of things to do and things to pursue and such.  But as I’m sure many can attest to, it’s quite another thing to get out there and realize one’s dreams, to help bring them to fruition in the here and now.

I look at where I actually am with certain things compared to where I thought I could be at one time or another, and I realize I’d like to move directly from ‘dreams’ to ‘reality’ in a transport of some sort (Beam me up, Scotty).  Lets just bypass the drudgery, the dips and the hard work to get from A to B, shall we?  Wouldn’t that be more fun?  (Now, I’ve never said that is what I’d like to do in so many words.  But my actions (or lack thereof) certainly do indicate that is a desire of mine on some level.)

But life and even fiction rarely work that way.  More often than not, there are countless hours of work logged in by an ‘overnight success’, hours of practice put by the ‘musical prodigy’, many sketches and rough drafts preceding the finished work of an artist and a writer.  Van Gogh didn’t just look at the stars and dream – he painted them in swirls of colour and feeling.  Charles Dickens didn’t merely think it would someday make a neat story to write about an old miser whose worldview is changed courtesy of three spirits who visit him one cold Christmas Eve – he wrote A Christmas Carol.  Nor did Beethoven think a handful of notes would one day make a nice ditty – he wrote his Fifth Symphony.

So I don’t want to leave tales of Plot Ninjas, high school teachers, or time travellers to languish on hard drives, in binders, and on various scraps of paper.  Nor do I want to keep dwelling in the past or ‘playing it safe’ and end up missing out on what God is doing now and what He’s got planned for the future.  It’s time to move past a simple recitation of Philippians 4:13 and get to putting it into practice.  I don’t know it all, and it may very well be there are dreams I will need to let go of and others that need to be tweaked or completely overhauled.  But that’s okay.  God promises in Psalm 32:8 that He will guide us along the best pathway for our lives, that He will advise and watch over us.  It’s up to me to either go where He leads or to fight Him like a stubborn mule (v. 9).  But if I go His way, it’s going to be wild, it’s going to be great, and it’s going to be full of Him. Ü