death of a dream

Household gods give worthless advice, fortune-tellers predict only lies, and interpreters of dreams pronounce falsehoods that give no comfort. So my people are wandering like lost sheep; they are attacked because they have no shepherd. (Zechariah 10:2)

What do you do when a dream dies? Something that you always dreamed of doing and now it is in ashes on the floor of life. What do you do? Where do you pick up and start again? How do you do it?

It is Saturday night and I am without a church to pastor. All I have ever wanted to do was to be an effective minister of the gospel, to teach people of the grace and love of God, to feed people, both spiritually and physically.

And yet I am without a church to pastor.

It is not that I am doing nothing in the kingdom. I teach the Sunday evening service, I go to the jail on Thursday nights, I write an awful lot, both for myself and for the church. I write an article each week for the bulletin in addition to putting the bulletin together and making it look good. I make up a handout for the men at the county jail each week. I have written half of the things that were needed for the various booklets the pastor has done, along with necessary editing. I video the services. We have people over for supper and encouragement. I am an integral part of the church and accepted as one of the pastoral staff.

I am doing almost as much as I did at Lincoln in my last work, yet we get no remuneration for it. It is all gratis. I cannot find a job and am living off my wife’s disability, a humiliating thing for me. I do not mind the sacrifice of time and talent. I am serving my King.

But the dream is dying more and more each day. Each day I get older and less attractive to any church. I am becoming an old man and am going nowhere very quickly.

My wife is just waiting to see what happens with me. She loves me and has always supported me and just waits now. She is in pain and is almost overcome by fatigue from dealing with the pain so she sits all day, playing computer games and napping, occasionally reading and watching a move on the computer.

And we wait, watching the dream dying more and more.

We were not always like this. Once we had a life and a church. I have always had larger churches and when I went somewhere, the church always grew. That is, until I came into the Pentecostal movement. When I did that, my life stopped.

It seemed what God wanted and everything pointed to it, but when I did, everything stopped cold. Ultimately, I was as welcome in the Pentecostal movement as the plague.

And I am tired. What do I do? I do not know. What I do know is that my dream is just about dead.

I still have wishes and longings, but those are not dreams. Those are symptoms of dead dreams.

It was amazing at how many people authenticated the dreams I had when I came into this group. People would come out of the woodwork to tell me a “message from God.” I got so sick of messages. Anybody can say that. But for the most part, it seems that they were falsehoods as Zechariah said: things told to me and I listened because it was what I wanted to hear.

Why will God not hear me and tell me what I need to do? He said he was a better father than I am, but I know that I would never treat my children this way.

I sued to have a life. Now I have nothing but deep depression.