Paradise undeserved

One of my favorite things about doing the newsletter for MOPS, is finding the cover article. I've found some great sources for good writing. My sister has contributed in the past, but this is an article I found on the MOPS website. I thought it was very good and inspirational. It's long, but worth the read! I hope you can live in your dreams today!

Dreaming
by Lindsey O' Conner

Long ago, little girls were very good at pretend. Plastic dolls and dress-up clothes and microphone spoons were their props as they rocked and twirled and sang, dreaming of what was to come. Time marched on, and the little girls grew. The props fell away and new ones took over–diapers and blankets and pacifiers, only the babies weren’t plastic this time.

The mommy-girls smiled as their babies grew, and one day they noticed their little baby-girls rocking and twirling and singing, practicing their future. And the mommies remembered their own dreams. Some smiled at the power of a dream, recognizing their former toys as their current tools, and whispered, “Dream on, sweet child.” Other mommies suddenly remembered a tucked away dream and dusted it off with excitement. But some mommies barely breathed, surprised that forgotten dreams now remembered hovered with the scent of unrealized longing.

Which mommy are you? Are you living dreams fulfilled, nurturing new vision, or do you look at your life and see lost dreams?

Dreams are powerful. Martin Luther King knew it when he made history saying, “I have a dream…” Others have said “we dream, therefore we become,” which is rather like the Proverb “as a man thinks, so is he.”

Dreams are thoughts wrapped in wishing and longing, desire and hope, for things that can be that are not now. They are visions of something better or different for ourselves, our children, and our world. Whether secret or shared, vivid or vague, thought desires or full-blown mind pictures, they can propel us to achieve, to become. Dreams lift us above the daily and stretch us as we reach beyond our grasp.

My friend Julie Barnhill knows the power of a dream. When she was a little girl, she made imaginary crowds cheer. “Why Mr. Carson, thank you for having me on your show,” she’d say, smiling in front of a mirror. As the girl became a mommy, she still pretended. With spit-up on her shirt and preschoolers in her van, she’d talk over the radio program and her kids, “Why Dr. Dobson, thank you for having me on your show.” She tended and pursued her dreams for another decade, and last year I watched Julie sit down behind a real microphone and say, “Dr. Dobson, thank you…” only this time it wasn’t pretend. Keeping her dreams alive has even allowed Julie to say, “Thank you for having me here, Oprah.”

We can mother well while still tending our dreams. So…

Think. While taking a bath or a walk or in snatches of time when the children are sleeping, take time to ponder the recesses of your heart. Focus on possibilities instead of limitations. Thought time is the seedbed of dreams.

Create. Stoke your creative nature. It often breeds more creativity and sparks the imagination–the essential of dreaming.

Talk. Even if your dream is private, talk with others who live in the world of your hopes or who embody aspects of your aspirations. Allow their experiences to motivate you.

Read. Expand your thinking and enter worlds beyond your own. Gain insight, vision, and new ideas.

Pray. Ask God to be the architect of your aspirations. He may have a bigger dream for you than what you could envision.

Act. Take action to turn dreams into reality. It may not seem life-changing at first. We don’t have to know all the how’s of accomplishing our desires in order to take the first step.

Sometimes we must allow a dream to die and be replaced with something new. Donna dreamed of becoming pregnant. But when her long-held desire was derailed by infertility, she found a new vivid dream–a little girl saying, “I’m on my way, Mommy.” God re-birthed her dream through adoption, and four years later Kristina bounced into her life from Russia with two brothers.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” So advance and endeavor to reach your dreams! Yet know that the process of reaching the dream-wrapped hope is also gold.