When Life Feels Too Hard for Dreams

We see it all of the internet right now:

What are your dreams for this year? Dream big!

What’s your word of the year? Set goals!

You can have whatever you put your mind to!

Except you can’t.

  • With terminal illness on the horizon a person may only be able to dream about making it through the next hour, never mind the year.
  • The person facing a divorce may not know what dreams look like anymore because their world is shards of glass around them and they’re just trying to figure out how to live without getting sliced open.
  • Infertility can leave an emptiness that reaches places in the heart making dreams nothing more than a balloon about to burst…over and over again.
Sometimes we face hard things that make dreaming feel impossible. It's okay to be in that place. You are not alone. Share on X

While the world is a frenzy with new beginnings and resolutions it’s okay to be in a different place. You can rest in knowing that you are not in that place alone, and you never will be.

The Original Dreamer is in your hard place with you. Always. Share on X

We can rest easy knowing that God has dreams for us that are so much bigger than our own. Even if we don’t see them or understand them.

We can rest easy knowing that we don’t have to pretend to be cheering for the new year with noisemakers and confetti because God is cheering for us every day.

We can rest easy knowing that we are loved, even in the darkest night.

God doesn’t use a calendar to decide when we need a fresh start. He’s with us in the hardest moments declaring his love and forgiveness and mercy all along the way.

Maybe your year isn’t starting the way you hoped. Maybe it’s been more than a year. Let yourself rest in God’s truth for your life today.

Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.

Romans 5:6-8, The Message
When you're facing hard things like illness or grief, job loss or worries, you can remember that you are not facing it alone.

#dreams #goals #help #faith

Author: Rebecca Hastings

Rebecca is a writer and speaker encouraging women to find real faith that works in real life. A wife and mother of three in Connecticut, she can often be found typing words, driving her kids places or wherever there is chocolate.

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  • Yes. I dread that standard interview question, “Where do you want to be in five years?” How should I know? I can say what I’d like, but I don’t know what will happen between now and then. Not that goals and dreams are unimportant, but they’re in God’s hands. And, like you say, they very often don’t turn out like we had thought they would.

  • The past few years I’ve been working on staying more in the moment, in the present. It’s difficult to do in this culture! ha. And my own hard-wiring is to always be planning ahead; that’s fun to me and anxiety-reducing. I’m thankful that ultimately it’s all in God’s hands anyway. 🙂 Thanks, Rebecca.