Flashback Friday: Writing Your Story One Week at a Time

 

Happy Friday, friends! Hope your day is beginning well, and I hope you have a minute or two to ponder this week’s prompt for writing your story. I found it this week and thought it was a good one – even if a potentially heavy subject!

            Do you have any unfulfilled dreams?

            There are so many subsequent questions that can come from this one.

            If you do…do you think they will ever come to pass? Are they in your power to see through to completion? Will you feel like life has been incomplete if this dream isn’t fulfilled? How do you find contentment in your everyday even without the fulfillment of these dreams?

            I do have unfulfilled dreams, and I don’t find that to be a bad thing. For me, unfulfilled dreams means there are still dreams out there waiting to be realized! It’s exciting!

            Some of my dreams are unlikely to ever come to pass.

I doubt I’ll ever get to experience being a teacher. It was what I wanted to do with my life when I was heading toward college, and I stand beside my reasons for not following that path, but I often wonder what life would have looked like if I had given it a shot. I study curriculum all the time and imagine what teacher life would be like, but I probably won’t ever know. Sometimes it makes me sad, but I try to keep my focus on the ways I get to teach others, even if it’s not in a classroom setting.

I’d love to own a B&B or coffee shop or ice cream shop, but I am pretty sure those will not happen for us. (Part of that is because of the travel dream: see below. Hard to own a business like any of these and travel extensively.) But it’s fun to think about and sometimes envision.

            Some of the dreams are wildcards.

            I’d love to publish more books, but I don’t know if that will happen. I am so grateful to live in a time in history when self-publishing is an option, so there is always the chance I could publish them myself. At the moment, I’m just not sure.

            I’d love to do the big cross-country road trip with Ryan someday, but who knows!? Who knows if we will ever be able to make it happen? I work on planning it, just in case, and I find a lot of joy in that, even if that’s all it ever is.

            For me, unfulfilled dreams are just an excuse to keep dreaming. I make Pinterest boards. I jot down notes in my journal. I talk to people who are living any one of these dreams and enjoy the stores I learn from them. My life is rich and full in many beautiful ways, and I am experiencing the realization of many dreams even now. What a gift that is!

            I’ll keep dreaming. And as the Lord opens doors, perhaps some of those will come true! How about you? How do your unfulfilled dreams mark your story?