Dreams that are obvious

This is the blog post that I write basically every day without realizing it. Basically everyone has dreams, goals, hopes, aspirations. Some more lofty than others, some more attainable than others, but all are life-giving. When you stop dreaming, you sort of stop.... stagnate. This is a a little of what happened to me when I went through some of my depression issues (compounded by the loss of my Grandmother and the burden of being a Mom and caregiver for my other Grandmother). I got so busy with grief and survival and the well-being of those I cared for, that I kind of forgot about dreaming. I didn't have the energy.

Then I kind of went a little overboard. I climbed out of the ditch of darkness and started running as fast as I could for fear of falling back in. I pursued my dreams of becoming a chaplain, enrolled myself in a unit of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) and completed this internship and education in the last two trimesters of my pregnancy and first 2 months of my son's life. Looking back, I think, what the hell was I thinking?! It was Hard. I did it though, and the sheer completion gives me more confidence now than I've had in a while. Once I saw the light (with a little help from my peer group in the program)- I realized I didn't need to run so hard. I could pursue multiple dreams without discrediting the others. I wanted to be a Mom. One that is home, doing the home thing. Basically I feel that I can do it better than anyone else and I don't make a mint trying to prove otherwise. That, and I genuinely want to be home with the boys.

Of course, I still need the art of dreaming to keep me from stagnating and getting a little stir-crazy. So in my break from my chaplaincy training, I'm finding that the dream that excites me the most right now is writing. I don't even know what that looks like. It's been a foundational dream of mine for ages. I have felt called to various roles in my life, but my heart always falls dreamily back on the art of writing. This is what makes me happy. This is what I steal time to do. This is the scariest, most obvious dream I have. And yet- I ignore it because I don't know what to do with it. So I dabble in blogging, I read others' writing. I get inspired by random articles posted on Facebook. I get annoyed by some articles that have been published and are horrifically written. I get self-conscious about my own style and wonder if I'm making grammatical and spelling errors left and right.

So, what do we do with our obvious dreams? The ones that haunt the back of our minds because while they make us the most happy, they also scare the ever-loving bejeebus out of us. They are often the hardest to accomplish, the vaguest to plan for, and of course they make the least amount of money. Who ever heard of a rich theologian?