Giving God Your Dreams

Your dreams are safest in God's hands.  Do you believe that?

I've wrestled through the issue of dreams a lot the past month.  Somehow mine never seem to come true while everyone else's do.  Since when was that fair?

As I've evaluated my life, I noticed again how hard it is for me to surrender my dreams to God and then leave them in His hands.  I really want something, but when I resign myself to the fact that it won't happen, I let my dream fall to the ground, watch it get trampled and die.  Or so I think.

I often think I have let go of dreams, gotten over my disappointments and moved on with my life.  That is, until those dreams are realized in someone else's life.  Then those desires return and I become jealous and sometimes depressed or angry.  There's a child inside of me that stomps and screams "But those were MY dreams!"  (That child doesn't like to share either.)

In the past six months, I have seen or am seeing several of my dreams realized by other people, and many of them are younger than me.  It makes me wonder why.  Why them and not me?  They were all good dreams and I have prayed over every one of them.  So far to each of these, God has said "No" or "Not yet" to me and "Yes" to them.  At times I can't understand why.

I heard someone say once that we should give our dreams to God and let Him give them back to us.  In a sense, our dreams are safest in God's hands.  That's a hard thing to do.  It's hard giving your dreams to God, not knowing when or if you'll ever see them again, not knowing if they'll come true.  But I do believe that's what God wants us to do.  He knows the deepest desires of our hearts better than anyone else.  I've had to give dreams and plans to God not knowing if or how He will give them back to me.  Although I can't always see it, I do have to trust that His plans for my life are best.

In writing this, God brought me to Leslie Ludy's song "Far Beyond".  Although this song is written in the context of romantic dreams, I believe her words can be applied to all of our dreams.  Here's a portion of her lyrics, the rest of which can be seen under the Youtube video I linked to.

Far beyond my deepest heart's desire
Far beyond what I could ever dream
Far beyond my fairy tale imaginations
Is Your perfect plan for me
There's no limit to romance in all its beauty
When the author of love shapes my destiny
Far beyond the most that I could long for
I will find the dreams You have dreamed for me.

I could search forever
I could look for true love everywhere
If all my dreams were answered
They still could not compare
To the beauty of Your ways
And all Your plans for my life
Cause You've been scripting out a story for me
Before the very foundations of time.

Do you believe that? Are you willing to trust that God's dreams for you are the best?  I'll be the first to admit it's hard to do.  They may not seem to be what we're hoping for at the time, but He's painting on a far greater canvas than we can see, and if we trust Him, He promises the end result will be beautiful.