Ever had a broken dream?
The popular group you so desperately want to be in blows you off.
You get injured before your senior year and miss the entire season.
Your dream girl dumps you for a real jerk.
The school you had your heart set on sends you a rejection slip.
Your Boss says, “I’m sorry. We’re downsizing.”
You find your teenager spending more time with drugs than books.
That business you spent your life building goes belly up.
Lab tests confirm your worst fear, “It’s cancer.”
The parent you always tried to please dies without saying a word.
Your spouse walks in and says, “It’s been real. I’m outta here.”
Irretrievable
What do you do when it feels like your life has shattered into a thousand irretrievable pieces?
Our first inclination is to pull out the hot glue and patch it up as best we can. But what if the dream can’t be repaired?
What if you can’t go back to the way it was before? What if the people you need to fix it are no longer around?
Is there life after a broken dream?
Finding Peace
Those are all questions I’ve faced more than once. In my own search, I’ve found the Bible offers hope for those who are broken dreamed.
Peace can be found after a dream breaks, but the road is windy and unexpected. It involves facing the brokenness. How? By allowing ourselves time to feel the disappointment and pray it.
Shock to Denial
We get the news, and we’re just devastated. Often, we go from shock to denial. We’re afraid. We don’t want to believe it is true, because it will hurt too much to believe that. We have held onto this dream so tightly and wanted it so badly.
That is precisely when we must take the time and give ourselves permission to feel our feelings and pray them to God.
Nobody in America is ever supposed to be sad. But life doesn’t work that way. Sooner or later, someone or something we have counted on is taken from us.
Facing It
When we have a loss, one of the hardest things to do is to face it, to pay attention to it. It’s so easy for us to “forget” the pain lurking just below the surface of our lives.
When a dream breaks, we need time to review the loss. What really happened? What is the true magnitude of our loss?
It helps to take short trips into solitude. We might take off from work early and spend 2 or 3 hours with our journal, a legal pad or a laptop. In some cases, we may need a day or two of alone time just to feel and think.
King David wrote,
When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
Psalm 4:4 (NRSVUE)
We can ponder our losses by writing them out. Getting those losses out on paper or a screen keeps them from swirling around in the shadows inside—just beyond our conscious awareness.
For many people it helps to talk them out. Friends, family members, or perhaps a professional counselor at time, can be extremely important sounding boards.
Praying It
Another form of talking our losses out is praying them out. There is nothing we are feeling that is a surprise to God. So many of us try to hide our feelings rather than simply letting them fly, unedited.
It might sound something like, “Lord, right now, I am mad, sad, scared, confused. I’m all over the map! I need help. I have no idea how this could have happened, and I can’t see You at work at all. What is going on?!!”
That’s a real prayer. You may wonder, “What good could come from pouring out my emotions before God? Author Alice Fryling explains it beautifully,
The good in focusing on your feelings is not to wallow in them. Nor is it just to clarify thinking. The goal is to notice and embrace the presence of God in this experience. When this happens, the peace that comes “transcends all understanding”
In other words, we cannot think our way into God’s peace. It’s beyond our understanding. The Bible also says that the love of God surpasses knowledge. No matter how much we know, God’s love is deeper, so sometimes the route to this peace beyond knowing is through our feelings.
God’s Peace
How many times have we missed the presence of God by focusing on what we know instead of laying out how we feel?
Feeling our feelings and honestly giving them to God is how we let them go and find a peace beyond understanding.
Here’s what this means. Weep if you need to weep. Write your feelings down. Talk them out with others. Feel the full extent of your loss and pray painfully honest prayers.
Doing this kind work, as often as it takes, will lead us to a peace only God can give.
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Roger Ross
A native of Cambridge, Illinois, Roger has served as a pastor in Texas, the British Channel Island of Guernsey, and Illinois. While in Illinois, he led teams that planted two new churches and served for 10 years as the lead pastor of one of the largest United Methodist Churches in the Midwest. It was his privilege to serve as the Director of Congregational Excellence in the Missouri Conference before coming into his current role with Spiritual Leadership, Inc (SLI).
Roger now comes alongside pastors, non-profit leaders and their leadership teams as an executive coach, specializing in leadership that inspires change. As a side gig, he loves teaching evangelism and church planting as an adjunct professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas.
Other passions of his include SCUBA diving in warm blue water, Krispy Kremes, and board games with family and friends. He also has a weakness for golf.
Roger is the author of three books, Meet The Goodpeople: Wesley’s 7 Ways to Share Faith, Come Back: Returning to the Life You Were Made For, and Come Back Participant Guide, all through Abingdon Press.
Now for the best part. Roger is married to Leanne Klein Ross, and they live Bloomington, Illinois. God has blessed them with two adult children, a son-in-law, several tropical fish, and one adorable granddog.
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