Pursue a Dream

As I thought about what to post for this day, I found that I was going back and reading some things I had posted since I started this blog. Sometimes when things to write about don't seem to be coming, I find that old posts inspire me. What I found this time, is that one of the posts was the one I wanted to share today.

I originally posted this on November 19, 2011. It's about pursuing our dreams and the excuses we make for not doing so. But, the reality that we can make all the excuses we want, but we have to choose to pursue our dreams even though everything doesn't seem to be right for doing so.

So here's the post I wrote then. May it encourage and challenge you in pursuing your own dreams.

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A couple of days ago, I read a quote that challenged me and made me think. It talked about putting dreams on hold when we have things to work on in our lives.

"One of the lessons I have learned in six and a half decades of life is that very few dreams should go on hold while you improve the shortcomings of your life. ... To be sure, there are times when you need to stop what you are doing and focus on conquering a flaw. But of you wait till all your shortcomings are remedied, you dreams will die. All our advances are with a limp.
If you wait till you are beyond criticism to pursue your dream, you will never do it. You won't marry or stay married. You won't decide to have children or raise them. You won't take your first job or keep it. You won't go into missions or stay there. ... Few things paralyze people more than their own imperfections. And there are always people around to remind you of your flaws and suggest you can't move forward until you're better." (John Piper, Bloodlines)

When I read that, it seemed like all my excuses for not pursuing my dreams were shot down in a couple of paragraphs. How often do we do exactly that? We have a list of things in our lives that we feel we have to fix before we can even begin to think about pursuing our dreams.

And the reality is that when we think that way, we often don't ever get around to pursuing our dreams. We just continue to have more things we need to work on. Or the time it takes us to feel like we have actually fixed anything is just long enough that we lose enough of the excitement for our dream that we don't follow through on pursuing it.

The sentence from the quote that seemed to jump off the page at me was: "All our advances are with a limp." There is incredible truth in that statement. We don't move forward in life perfectly. As we pursue our dreams, we will make mistakes and we discover things about ourselves that we need to change or "fix." We do move forward with a limp. The important thing is that we do move forward.

What are your dreams? Are you pursuing them? Why are you not pursuing them? What would it take for you to begin to pursue them?