New Year's Resolutions and Dreams Fulfilled

Have you made any New Year’s Resolutions yet? Alan playfully suggested that he and I make the same three every year: lose weight, exercise more, fight less. While we were giving toasts last night, Stephen reworded those ideas into something slightly more elegant: eat more nutritious foods; have a more active life style, and live at peace with the world. I can definitely sign on! I’m also the family historian and sentimentalist (read that pack-rat) and every year resolve to try to do a better job of giving away/throwing out excess material goods as well.

For those of you who come upon this blog but haven’t known me for long, I also want to share a sort of dream-beginning-to-come true. When I was 22, I had a dream of going around the world sharing the good news that Jesus had died to save us from our sins and reconcile us to God and one another. My sister and I spent the summer working with missionaries in Scotland and then began what we thought was going to be a several year trek around the world. However, on our way out of Edinburgh, I checked the post office one last time, and low and behold, found a letter from a friend (Alan…who later became my husband) with a “PS—Sorry about your mom’s accident. I hope she makes it.”

As it turned out, my mother had gotten into a nearly fatal car accident traveling from Michigan to Colorado to attend her mother’s funeral. My mom was so delighted that my sister and I were going off on an adventure (as she thought of it) that she told our family in no uncertain terms to keep her bad news a secret from us. Alan, on the other hand, had heard the news but not the admonition.

Well, Ann and I prayed fervently for a day and then decided we should come home and try to support our parents, who were not believers at that time (although they later both did become Christians). Gone was my dream of reaching out to the nations of the world with the love of Christ and the beauty of God’s grace! What then, instead, Lord? Ann and I both ended up entering Grace Seminary that fall.

Fast forward 40 years. I married and reared a brood of seven wonderful kids. The internet came into existence. It seemed impractical to go back to graduate school at age 6o+ (although some do, and I admire them greatly). WHAT, Lord, do you want me to do to show my love for you now? My older brother got me interested in blogging. I loved to write. I loved photography. I’d traveled the world with Alan at this point and had …100,000 pictures or so? “Use the staff that’s in your hand.”

So, from the quiet of my home, I began a timid effort to blog. WordPress creates an annual report to encourage their constituents, and I just received mine for 2012. This past year people from 164 different countries checked out my blog over 60,000 times. I suspect if I’d spent three years traveling around the world, I would not have been able to meet that many people in that many countries! It’s like a miracle fulfillment of a dream I’d had. I feel like the Lord has done for me what I wanted to do for Him!

If you are young, do you have dreams of what you’d love to do for the Lord? May I encourage you to be prayerful and faithful every day, and the Lord may make your dreams come true…but in such a wonderful way that you will know it’s His great kindness and mercy, not your great sacrifice of love and service. God is just that amazing! So, don’t be afraid to try, and know that God will bring to pass something that will bring glory to him and joy to you!

“Go up to the mountain, and bring wood, and build the house: and I will take pleasure it it, and I will be glorified, saith the Lord” (Haggai 1:8).

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