Grieving

The death of a dream.  Some dreams were never meant to be fulfilled this side of heaven.  When my husband and I had children, we automatically began to dream dreams for them.  We dreamt about what they would look like, who they would become, their gifts and talents, their spouses, their passions; the lives God planned for them.  Then, one day came the diagnosis we were expecting....autism.  Suddenly, the dreams we had for our son died.  Those dreams were replaced by questions.  Will he ever speak?  Will he go to school with his siblings?  Will he be able to live on his own?  What do we do now?

What do you do when the spouse you were to grow old with leaves or dies?  What do you do when the children you dreamed of having never come?  What do you do when your empty nest is suddenly filled with your grandchildren needing to be raised?  What do you do when the business you dreamed of owning fails?  You grieve.  I grieved.  I yelled at God.  I cried.  I got mad.  I prayed for a miraculous healing that never came.  Grief is something we all face in this fallen world.  No one likes it, and we don't get to choose if or when we experience it.  The problem isn't the grief itself, it's the getting stuck in the grief.  The problem comes when we decide to live day after day in the grief; accepting it as a burden to be carried to the bitter end.  And that's what happens, we become bitter to the end.

So what do you do when a dream dies?  You let it go.  I had to let go of the dreams I once had for my son.  And as I did, a wonderful thing began to happen.  New dreams appeared.  Dreams of who God made him to be.  Dreams of what God planned for him to do.  So I began to look for the gifts and talents that my son possessed and I began to see the new possibilities.  Yes, they were different, but not any less important or significant.

Sometimes the grief returns.  I have a friend who refers to it as a wave.  Sometimes I can see the wave coming, like at our yearly school evaluations.  Sometimes, the wave takes me by surprise.  It comes, and I find myself crying again for lost dreams.  I once again have to release them into God's hands.  But I have learned that the grief does leave and that there are new dreams to dream.