Dream and let go

This picture in my art journal was painted with watercolour and acrylics onto a patchwork of pages from an old paperback novel. I like the way the white highlights make the images pop out. I couldn’t find a quote I liked so I made up my own.

I blogged about letting go a while back. You can see that blog here.

In that post I was talking about letting go of things when their time was up and it was time to move on. This picture above is about a different kind of letting go.

Sometimes we have a dream, a vision or an aspiration, but it just doesn’t seem to be coming to fruition. I’ve got something like this going on in my life at the moment. Sometimes however much you try to achieve your dream, there can be things that aren’t under your control. This is when it’s time to let go. Not to forget about it or to think it will never happen, but to believe it will, and to leave it in God’s hands.

Getting back to my picture, its like flying a kite. If you have the kite on a short string, if you keep fighting with it to pull it the way you want it to go, then you’re in for a battle with the end result being that the kite either breaks the string and is lost or it can’t fly and it crashes to the ground.

But if you let it go a little, if you let out some more string, if you let it find the wind so that it can fly freely, dance around, move to a better part of the sky, then you and the kite are in harmony. The kite is flying.

And I think its like that with dreams and aspirations. If we hold them too tightly or try to confine them or bring them into close proximity too soon, we can stifle them. They can crash and burn or they can slip through our fingers never to be seen again.

But if we believe in them, nurture them, allow them to go ahead and follow where they lead, then we can be in for an exciting and high-flying time.

Trying to live my life under God’s guidance can be challenging. I want to fly my own kite; I want to hold it closely and do everything I can to make things happen for myself. But I’ve learned time and time again that God’s timing and purposes are the best and when I trust him to make things happen then they turn out in the best way possible.

Isaiah 55:8-9 says

‘for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares The Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’

While this does not absolve me of any responsibility for moving forwards and striving for excellence in all I do, it does tell me that God knows best, and so when I dream or aspire to something, I give it to God and believe that if it is his will then he will open doors for me. And like the kite, sometimes the dream I had will fly in a different way to what I imagined; a better and more exciting way, and sometimes a way I would never have ever dreamed for myself.

So today I encourage you to dream and then let go. To place your dream into God’s hands and let him blow it where he will.