As we pray for hearts broken by the #earthquake in #Japan, I recall songs that help us put a melody to our pain or bring peace and understanding to the helpless. We're all essentially helpless, aren't we? We are all standing alone in this world. Whether our feet are planted on a mountain or on the shore, at any moment all we know can change. The ground can shift beneath our feet and vanish. The earth can beat, tremble and quake, building up to a deafening crescendo of rhythmless chaos.
When this happens we hold our breath. Once our worlds become still again some of us cautiously tip-toe our way back into our old existence. Some of us are heavy hearted or simply grateful to survive. Some of us become completely vulnerable, our anguish drawing lines on our faces for the world to see. Others completely withdraw. Earth-shaking events, figuratively, literally and spiritually, also have the power to turn us away from who we were and towards a new life.
Sometimes, we never recover. Just as we held our breath at the end, we hold it still... waiting rigidly for the world to shake again. And we wait, and we wait, and we worry and wait. We worry for those lost the last time. We worry for those who will be lost when it happens again.
"The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.” (The Sunscreen Song)
But in life, every day is a Tuesday. Every day is a day that the world could change. Every day could be our last chance.
So with this thought, I wonder: The earth shakes. Is it possible that it’s trying to shake us awake?
Dreams are funny things. When we’re actually asleep, our dreams are rapidly paced stories, ideas... snip-its of images, emotions, desires and memories that fly through our subconsciousness at such speeds that our brains have the ability to complete several dreams over the course of the night. Have you ever pressed the snooze button and dreamt an entire adventure in a 15 minute period?
Yet when we’re awake, dreams can stretch out over a lifetime. Sometimes, circumstances and cynicism snuff them out before we have the chance to believe they can become a reality.
When the earth shakes, I think about our dreams and where we’d be without them. I think about lives lived day-by-day, without passion, without pursuit, without a vision of the day our dream comes true rolling in our brain like a movie, without a twinkle in our eye and a smile when we discover we’ve successfully taken one step closer towards the goal.
My biggest motto in life is this: everything happens for a reason. I think this also applies to dreams. I don’t believe dreams originate in the brain. I believe they come from your heart. So depending on where your heart is, that influences the direction of your dreams... and not only the direction, but intent. I believe your dreams happen for a reason and on some level, our dreams choose us.
For example, I’ve had friends throughout my life who’ve had dreams so different from mine, I simply can’t fathom where they came from. That’s because they aren’t born from my gifts. How can I have a goal to work as an Imagineer for @Disney when I’m terrible at computer science? How can I dream of becoming the next @ErinAndrews when I know being asked to recall names and statistics on-the-fly would result in heart palpitations and nervous perspiration? Why would I want to be a history professor when my memory is so poor I rely on friends and family to remind me of major events that occurred in my own life?
Sometimes dreams are born because they are a means to an end, not because your heart, passion and talents lead you to them. If someone was passionate about pop culture, fashion, fame and obsessed with @LadyGaga, maybe they would dream to be a pop star? But what if they couldn’t sing, write songs or play an instrument and had severe stage fright? While their passions might lead them to fantasize that stardom is the only option, their true talents might be better suited for a goal like becoming a staff member @TMZ.
This, I believe, is the danger of dreams, and why it’s so important to examine ourselves and where are dreams come from in order to evaluate if it’s a true passion, a reflection of ourselves and the ultimate use of our talents, or simply a means to an end.
Since your dreams are from your heart, It’s impossible to have a dream that doesn’t involve your soul. The heart is where the soul calls home. I’m sure that’s why pouring your “heart and soul” into something is the ultimate expression of dedication. Of course, there’s also “blood, sweat and tears” but those are merely the body’s physical reaction and sacrifice for true passion.
So we have dreams born from our heart which generate goals that, when pursued, satisfy our soul. As long as you’re following a dream that came from your heart then you’re living a life worth living. You can say “I did my best with the time I had. I followed my dream,” if your world happens to shake on some idle Tuesday and you find that you disappear along with the earth beneath your feet.
But what if your heart is in the wrong place? What if you’ve planted your heart in sand? At the moment when it all falls apart, will you still have peace?
If our dreams chose us, based on our talents and where our heart is, then deciding where we plant our heart is probably the most important decision of our lives. Lucky for us, we have complete control and freedom to chose where we want our heart rooted.
In today’s world, planting our heart in sand is a pretty popular choice. It’s heavy. It’s flexible enough to conform around any shape. It can be bagged and stacked and help hold back the flood waters. It can also funnel through an hourglass. This can be terrible if you run out of sand, obviously. But as long as the world keeps turning it seems to keep pouring new sand into the top of the funnel. The sand of 2001 is not the same sand we dig our hearts into in 2011. The culture is different, the celebrities and athletes have different names and faces. The politics and disasters have different headlines. I like to think of sand as the here and now; the obvious and most tangible choice for us to plant our heart into because it’s something we see every day. There’s familiarity. But, in my experience at least, the sand can be frustrating. Because it’s constantly changing, I always feel like it’s impossible to keep up.
In college, the girls with the @Coach purses were “somebody.” I had a fake Prada I bought in China Town during my winter internship at @GoodMorningAmerica. It cost me $22. No one ever associated it with a brand, I assume, because it wasn’t plastered in some trade marked logo. I liked it because it was black, a convenient size and reminded me of a mini soft-sided duffle bag, just like what I used to carry all of my volleyball gear. I purchased it because of familiarity. I used it for 7 years until the spring piping busted lose to the point it was snagging my clothes and finally threw it away, right after my dad and step mom sent me a brand new Coach purse for my birthday. It was fancy pants. I felt like people treated me a little differently. Then recently I was in line at a store and noticed just about every female had some variation of the exact bag I was carrying. Somewhere over the years that symbol of a “somebody” had become the symbol of an “everybody.” Great news for @Coach because it’s always good business to appeal to the masses. You could say that the sand of my college years had trickled out of the bottom of the funnel and been replaced by something else... a Birkin bag perhaps?
Another thing about sand, when the earth shakes, it slips out of the hour glass a little faster, doesn’t it? And if the earth shakes hard enough, couldn’t the sand our hearts are planted in disappear faster than the world can refill our funnel? Suddenly the foundation for our dreams evaporates and suddenly our dreams feel meaningless.
Meaninglessness. Now that’s a sad thought. Spending a lifetime pursuing dreams, born from a heart buried in a foundation that can vanish beneath us whenever the earth decides she wants to shake us hard enough.
So when the earth decided to shake this week... I wonder if it wasn’t really trying to shake us awake? “Hey, your foundation isn’t strong enough.” “Hey, you know all that stuff you thought was important? It’s gone. So now what are you going to do?” “Hey, I’m warning you that what you’ve buried your heart in does not last. I would try to find something a little stronger.”
What could be stronger? What can I secure my heart in that would be solid enough so that when the earth shakes, when the foundation under my feet crumbles away and disappears, I know that my heart, my soul, my dreams and my life had purpose and meaning and fulfillment?
I know Jamey Johnson and Charlie Midnight understand the struggle... the realization that what we put value on won’t be there for us when that idle Tuesday comes:
“Goin down the wrong road, living by the wrong code, chasin’ after dreams that don’t come true,” Jamey Johnson sings, “Looking for the right signs and riding on the white lines trying to find my way to you.”
When the earth shook and the world witnessed the massive destruction, I know many of us considered that this could be the end. We can’t help but think this way when we see a massive tragedy occur beyond our control. From acts of terrorism to Mother Nature’s wrath and even cultural wars and societal differences... many of us think “the end is near.”
So what? So what if this is all there is? So what if the sum of life is just as Jack Nicholson says in The Bucket List; “We live, we die and the wheels on the bus go round and round.”
What are we so afraid of? Why is the “end” or “death” such a scary thing?
The answer: Because we are human. We have an instinct to survive. Without it, we would have been dead as a species long ago. But, dare I say it, this is not what God intended. God did not want to put all this hard work and effort into a creation in His own image just to let it seasonally exist then vanish. A life of meaninglessness is not what we’re here for.
So, with our desire to survive and our desire to have meaning in our lives, perhaps we should invest a little more effort in selecting the foundation for our hearts? Your heart houses your soul and nurtures the roots of your dreams. I want my heart to be planted in the strongest foundation I can find so if the earth shakes and my world disappears, I know that the life I lived was not in vain. I want my dreams to be purposeful and while success is a dream for everyone, I want the intent behind my pursuit of success to be for a greater purpose.
You know how hard people work to be “somebody?” But what’s so interesting is that the most famous person in the world 100 years ago might be mentioned in a history book, but for the most part they’re all but forgotten. Most of us would have to consult @Google to even know who was “on top of the world” 10 or 25 years ago!
Everything we do in life is so fleeting and unbelievably temporary. Money, fame, and success in general slip through our fingers a million times faster than it took to obtain those things. But that’s what they are; things. In the end, that’s all they are. If it won’t be with you when the hourglass shatters, then it didn’t really matter.
Yet somehow it’s still important to pursue goals to the best of your ability, even if the payoff may be fleeting.
“You can pour your soul out singin’ a song you believe it that tomorrow they’ll forget you ever sang. Sing it anyway,” Brett Warren, Brad Warren and @MartinaMcBride wrote.
This, I believe, is another one of the key blessings of our design. I could spend my life laying helplessly on my living room floor, agonizing how nothing I do matters in the world so why even try? But fortunately, God gives us desire to do, think and act.
If the core of my dreams, my heart, is planted in the best possible foundation, wouldn’t this mean that my dreams are a direct result? If my foundation is strong, then I don’t have to worry about my dreams producing something rotten, or being misguided, because the roots are in a healthy, solid environment. Yes, we all make mistakes. Sometimes we get the signs a little confused. But always, and truly always, if our heart is in the right place and we’re pursuing a dream, while we may not achieve what we originally planned, we find something else extraordinary.
I have a tweet I like to post from time to time: “Don’t be mad when you pray for a lemon and get an orange. Sometimes what you get is sweeter than what you wish for,” @DaniDubetz.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pressed towards a goal, wound up somewhere completely different and thought, “Wow! This is way better than my first plan!”
That’s because our dreams are always guide posts, but never final destinations.
What if the foundation of my heart was a rock? What if I put a rock in my funnel? I would want a rock big enough that it wouldn’t fall through the hole, but just the right size that it could let all the sand the world poured in to slip past the rock and through to the other side. Sometimes some sand might collect on my rock. I might get distracted by the world’s sand from time-to-time but the rock will still be there and when I realize my mis-step I can brush the sand off of my rock and push on.
This is my favorite thing about my rock theory: Let’s say my Tuesday arrives and not only does the earth shake, but the world shatters my hourglass. What would happen to a rock in an hourglass? If the hourglass shattered, it would still be in tact. It would still be solid. It would still be complete and whole and as the shards crashed around it. It would be unfazed. That’s the type of foundation I want to plant my heart in; something so solid that even when the end comes, it’s still there. The walls of the world fall away and the rock falls to a place on the other side, with my heart safely in its grasp.
I’ve been searching for the right rock throughout my life. I tested substitutes but nothing else worked the same. Nothing else was strong enough to withstand all the world throws my way. Nothing else guaranteed that my dreams would produce healthy fruit instead of fruit that looked beautiful on the outside but was sour, black and mealy under the skin. I sought the perfect rock that would nourish me through life and still be there when my Tuesday comes and still be cradling my heart even after my hourglass shatters. I found a perfect rock, but I only found One: Isaiah 26:4.
