Dreams

I have come to a place where I am looking for a full-time job and doing so because that is what I am supposed to be doing. I am a graphic designer because my culture ordains that I fit a certain mold. Graphic design is what I do, but not who I am. I have forgotten this.

The other day, while reading John Eldridge’s book, The Ransomed Heart, I came to page 145 and the excerpt entitled On Mozart and Martha Stewart. What an eye opener this passage is to me.

This is precisely what happens when God shares with mankind his own artistic capacity and then sets us down in a paradise of unlimited potential. It is an act of creative invitation, like providing Monet with a studio for the summer, stocked full of brushes and oils and empty canvases. Or like setting Martha Stewart loose in a gourmet kitchen on a snowy winter weekend, just before the holidays. You needn’t provide instructions or motivation; all you have to do is release them to be who they are, and remarkable things will result. As the poet Hopkins wrote, “What I do is for me: for that I came.”

Oh, how we long for this – for a great endeavor that draws upon our every faculty, a great “life’s work” that we could throw ourselves into. “God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there” (Guinness). Our creative nature is essential to who we are as human beings – image bearers – and it brings us great joy to live it out with freedom and skill.

I long to dream again and to be given over to my true life’s work or to have the opportunity to just do and be what I truly am. I used to dream of traveling the world. I used to dream about leading people on trips to connect them with the outdoors and with adventure. I have forgotten these dreams and others. They have been stored in boxes and tucked away in the attic of my heart.