Don’t Dream Past Your Life {…another Mother’s Day Week essay for you…}
There's a hummingbird who flew past my studio window last week. I have’t even put out a feeder yet this year, but there he was, hovering in that impossible way they do, wings a blur.
I think about the hovering, sometimes. And I hope to make it make sense to you by the end of this post. My brain is a kaleidoscope of associations, which can often make me sound…well, “eccentric”.
Because that hummingbird made me wonder if you are already living the thing. The actual thing. The sort of life you’ve been dreaming of and saving to Pinterest boards and praying for.
And I wonder if you don't know it. Because the algorithm has been very, very busy telling you it isn't enough.
Here's what we all finally know for sure: social media is not a window. It's a sales floor. Every time you scroll, someone is showing you a better version of a life you are already living.
And we've scrolled long enough now that most of us have forgotten what our own life looks like when we're not holding it up against someone else's reel with the cinematic music.
Three of my grandchildren live here on this culdesac, in two other homes. Which is a manifestation of a dream I cherished all the way back in my twenties. That young dream was a grand one of owning gorgeous mountain property and giving parcels to grown children.
That never happened. Nothing even close to that happened. But what did happen is my twin daughters grew up, married, had babies, and two of the houses in this culdesac went up for sale within 6 months of each other.
And so we all share a culdesac in a semi-sketchy urban neighborhood, a block or two away from various rehab and treatment centers.
But my twin daughters are next door, and three of the grandkids are growing up playing in the same yard their mothers did, which still does something to my chest I don't have language for.
And I could have missed it. Not because I was somewhere else physically. But because some small, restless part of me would be thinking about what I don’t have.
I could have missed half of it or all of it, half-dreaming up a better version of the very thing I am standing in the middle of.
Mama, God’s means is the masterpiece. I've said it a hundred times. Taught it. Painted it. Stitched it into talks I've given in church sanctuaries and outdoor gazebos tucked away in the mountains of Tennessee.
Yet I can still forget it on a rainy Wednesday.
Psalm 90 ends with this prayer: "Lord, establish thou the work of our hands." But the verse before it, the one we truncate in our hurry to get to the good part, says "let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us."
That tiny passage has been my home base Scripture since my first morning as a 20-year-old married woman. It was a bracing chill morning, and I stepped outside, surrounded by the Smoky Mountains, and my brand new Bible (a wedding gift from my new husband on our wedding day) fell right open to it. It is the very first of thousands of Scriptures I’ve underlined in that Bible since. There it is…still underlined in shivering, wobbly ink, and dated 11/09/1986 .
Beauty first. Then establishment. The Lord's beauty landing on ordinary hands, ordinary days, ordinary lattes and hummingbirds and children who then gave me grandchildren. Seeing it is the work. Recognizing it is the dream.
Ten years will go by. They go, and they go fast, and they don't ask your permission. For example, the woman I was at 44 was a little lost, certain she'd missed her whole life, late to everything she loved. That woman could not have imagined standing in this cul-de-sac with paint on her hands calling THIS the answer to her prayers.
But it is. It was. The whole time.
Don't dream past your one wild and precious life, friend. The life you're living right now is asking, quietly, patiently, the way hummingbirds hover, to be seen and loved into a state of grace.
Put the phone down. Go look at it.
(And see? I was going somewhere with the whole hummingbird thing! My brain just had to write it to know where my heart was headed.)
