Live Your Dream
Summer is coming ever so quickly with roses climbing on the fences and much mowing and haymaking, tree pruning, and other farm chores to be done. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are poking their heads from the raised garden beds. The wood stove has been emptied of its ashes; the air conditioner serviced and running.
Yesterday, I found a wasp nest and a feisty wasp inside my bird feeder. He had to go. I watched little ruby-throated hummingbirds hover and sip from the fake flowers filled with sugar water. They reminded me of children, hot from play, stopping at the garden hose for slurps of cool water.
What this season here on the Hollis Farm may hold we’ve yet to see. Grandkids will come to visit and swim and fish and sit on the porch swing sucking on fruit colored popsicles. They’ll make messes and noise and memories. Ron will work in the orchard, bale hay, tend cows, and use his old dozer to cut a new road to the back of our eighty acres.
Six of our heifers will be producing calves later this fall and the orchard will with God’s good blessing produce more pecans than we can harvest without hiring help.
We buried my dad in Michigan in early May. He was the last of our four parents to pass away. Their funerals gave me a strong sense of my own mortality. Soon this earthly sojourn will be passed. There is much I have yet to accomplish.
Has anyone ever encouraged you to live your dream?
The years that I spent raising our seven children were not wasted years even though the world blares its message “Live your dream! Find your dream!” This is the blast that women who follow the pathway of motherhood hear daily. I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve heard it. “Don’t waste your skills and your education at home. Get out there and live your dream. Childrearing? That’s the government’s job. Homemaking? No way! Housekeeping? Hire it done. Take time for you. Do only what makes you feel happy at all times. Do more outside the home. Get more. Live better. You deserve it. The dream lies.
My dream was to be a missionary. But, my calling––to be a mom, to raise children in the love of Jesus, to teach and train them up to be happy, healthy, spiritually strong humans, capable of leading future generations.
Our culture does not teach that such a dream is viable, good, and worth attaining to, but it is.
Motherhood––a home mission field awaited me and I knew if a missionary could strongly disciple just a handful of persons in his work, he would be considered a success. Not all of mine turned out as I had hoped, yet, but God blessed and honored that call and ministry.
Ecclesiastes 5:8 says: For in many dreams and in many words there is emptiness. Rather, fear God. Dream–chasing––instead of fearing God, I think, is a human thing, maybe an American thing but we can’t afford it. The better dreams are the dreams He has placed on our hearts in giving ourselves for others.
Well, what of dreams? Aren’t they important and aren’t they worth chasing? Of course, many are, but those are the dreams God gives, the vision He plants in us to follow a certain path. Though Motherhood is a hard path, often passing through grief and pain, it is also a path strewn with wonder and joy.
So stick with it, you weary moms. It is worth it to love your children. It is most certainly worth the step to lay aside our dreams to take up God’s.
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Elece Hollis is a mom of seven and a grandmother to twenty-four. She and her husband Ron live on a farm in Oklahoma where they tend cows and an orchard of pecan trees. Elece is an avid photographer and a lover of all thing home and family. She has written many magazines articles and stories, worked on over twenty-five freelance book projects. She also writes poetry and a column for stay-at-home moms. Find her blog elecehollis.com and keep an eye out for her next book What’s Good About Home!
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