Plans, part two: Dreams in Open Hands

A long time ago, nearly four years ago now, God asked me to relinquish my plans for my life, however grand and enthralling, and trust His, whatever they may be.  I wrote about it here, Plans, part one, and began the long process of obeying.

Mainly for me at the time, it meant giving up my dream of getting married.  "Can you trust that I can still fulfill you and provide for you if you were to remain single?" God asked me.  My first response, as I wrote about it in the poem, was not so certain.  My hands were closed tightly around my plans, I could see them, and I liked them.  God's plans belonged to the scary unknown.

But with some wrestling over the course of a semester or so, I gave up my dreams. I learned to say "if I get married" instead of "when I get married," and learned to be careful about participating, if at all, in the many conversations college girls will have in dorms in which they plan their weddings and pick out names for their children.  (Most of the said girls in these conversations at the time didn't even have boyfriends, which made them particularly unconstructive.)  I assumed, for all intents and purposes, that I would be single for the rest of my life.  It was hard, and it was liberating.

And God smiled at my open hands and, after many unexpected plot twists, I'm getting married this April to a wonderful man of God who loves books and ministry as much as I do and is already close with my family.  So I am learning what it means to dream again, but together, and with open hands.  This too is a process, and has been over the past few years.

So here is the poem of that process, a fitting response and second part to my old "Plans" sketch, a sonnet for my Jonathan and I and the journey before us.


We whispered dreams, you and I:
And so we shall again and again
By candles or cold front stoops.
Yet what are our tremulous dreams but dust?
What are dreams ever but dust, fragile,
     Spun to catch the light like gold?

I am of dust and you are of dust
And He remembers our form--
If we are ignoble it is not of our wind-blown origins.
Spirit is wind-breathing life:
     Illuminate, ennervate, beautify, penetrate.

Spirit-wind, blow into our dreams
Life and hope and fire; illuminate
     Our dust into something more like life or gold.


Allison