Christiana lives up to her name and I am grateful for that. We need more Christianas in this world!

Read and be encouraged to be faithful, to submit faithfully to the will of the Lord in your life. He is good. You can trust Him with all your life too.

Receive, and Be Glad
By Christiana Hale

“Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad” (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, PAGE).

We all dream. Daydreams and weird dreams. Dreams that are really aspirations. We hope and we plan to make those dreams a reality. I still remember, even now, the dreams I had when I was small. A six-year-old in pigtails who decided to become a circus performer (it was a short-lived dream though, destined to give way to the cowgirl phase). I still remember where I was when I decided to become a missionary to Africa or perhaps Indonesia. The dry yellow grass rattled and rustled around my knees, the smell of the hot dirt baking in the August sun, and the sheer, overwhelming weight of conviction that came to rest on my eleven-year-old heart. I was going to save souls. Then I was an awkward teenager, holing myself up in my room for hours typing away at my computer. One novel, then two flew from my fingertips, fueled by oceans of tea and sustained by the patience of my family as I disappeared into worlds of my own making. I would save souls through words printed in ink. Then I’m a shy Freshman college student, terrified and uncertain, dreaming only of straight A’s and maybe making new friends along the way. Mostly just dreaming of making it through another week without giving up and going home. Late twenties, two degrees later, and the dreams are grander again. Publish books, study at Oxford, become a great college professor, make a difference, make a name for myself – but secretly, the despair at not having a husband and children yet wrapped its bony fingers around my soul. Diversion tactics came into play. Nothing to see here. Move along please. Look at these other big, important things I’m working on. I’m happy you see. Dreams are coming true. I don’t really want…

We lie to ourselves all of the time.

I am thirty now. I did not look forward to turning thirty. Because I had finally stopped lying to myself and accepted fully that I had (and have) deep desires that are yet unfulfilled. Now what? What must I do with these?

The answer came with struggle, with prayer and tears and long walks in the cold chill months of north Idaho winters. It came when the ground was hard and brittle, when the bare tree branches scraped against the stars.

Plant them.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (John 12:24, NKJV).

We plant dreams. Place them in the ground in faith. Let them fall and slide from your fingertips. You will let them go in any case. You can give them up in faith or they can be pried from your stubborn hands, fingers cracking in the effort to retain some semblance of control. Plant your dreams and give them to the One who can give the increase. The One who sends the showers and the springs. The One who sends blossoms.

But some dreams never bloom.

Some seeds go into the ground, never to be seen again. What about those?

Receive, and be glad.

Receive. And be glad.

What do we have that we have not received? The dreams and the planting. The repentance and forgiveness. The small joys and the large victories. The heights and the depths. Our Lord gives us gifts like these and calls us to plant and plant again. And the harvest is not always what we expect.

My Lord has broken my fingers. My grasping and my striving to keep my dreams in clenched fists has been destroyed in His grace. Pried open, laid bare, I am not ashamed to confess that vanity and pride were my close companions for many years. But my Lord is a Master Gardener and He has broken up hardened soil, pruned and ploughed, watered and re-sown. When I let Him sow in me, I find that my dreams have become more modest and held with open hands.

A husband. Family. Children. An inheritance in the Lord. Good things He hasn’t given me yet. Deeply sown desires, but laid open to the rays of the sun, simply waiting for the Lord to shed His grace upon them. To make them fruitful.

Have gratitude. Receive. And be glad.

I am small. And my dreams are small. God stitches us together by means of small things – small mercies, small joys, small fruitfulness. He uses the small, foolish things of this world to put to shame the proud. When I think back on my life, complete with my many foolish dreams and petty weaknesses, I see a rich tapestry of God’s goodness and faithfulness. My childhood was stitched with crimson and shot through with starlight. My mother reading Narnia stories to me and my sister before bed. Creeping out of bed in the middle of the night to crouch by my open window and watch the moonlight on the river and listen to the howling of the coyotes echo against the mountains. My favorite corner of the old library. I can still picture where the faded green biographies of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone used to sit, the ones I’d check out over and over again.

Blankets on a trampoline on a warm summer night, stargazing with friends and talking about the future and the past and the promises of God. A field of flowers. A friend with babies. Sunset-chasing, meteor-shower-watching. Bittersweet farewells, heartbreakingly happy reunions. Death and new life and aching joints and late-night talks with roommates who confront your sin. Confession and repentance. Kind eyes and loud laughs. Weariness and good sleep and good coffee. Steam curling off a bowl of soup on a crisp autumn day. Days when everything goes right. Days when everything goes dreadfully wrong. Heartbreak and healing and heartbreak again.

“Be comforted, small one, in your smallness.”

I am not where I dreamed that I would be. And I know I am not the only one. His ways are not our ways. Praise the Lord! I would not have written my story this way. It is infinitely better than I would have planned. Even the trials that He has crafted for me. Because all of it, the heights and depths, are shaping me into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. My life is not a series of dreams coming true – it is the process of becoming true. I am being re-made into a true woman, the one that He wants me to be. With every chip of the chisel, every spade piercing earth, I am being fashioned.

How?

Accepting all things with gratitude as coming from the hand of a loving Father.

Planting dreams in hope, letting them fall to the ground and praying for a harvest.

Submitting to His will in joyful obedience in the small things. Sacrificing dreams. For I am small and this is good.

Laughing through the smallness and the joys and the sorrows and the trials. This is His will for me: gratitude and joy, obedience and fruitfulness.

I don’t have children. But I have ninety students that sit under my guidance. I have dear friend who (for some reason) ask for my advice. I have little sisters and older sisters beyond number. I have written a book. I am writing more. I’ve made meals beyond number and picked flowers for the sick and weary. I’ve been fruitful. He has made me fruitful. I’ve received and so I give. All of this is because it is He who works in me. He plants and waters and sows and weeds and tends.

So receive. And be glad.

For “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).

*****