I am anxious and unsettled.  I am looking and dreaming.  I am striving and surrendering.  And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

It’s funny what a trap life can become.  For those of us who go about life in a reasonably responsible way, our paths seem to just map out and proceed in a safe, if unspectacular way.  But these are not really the paths I wanted to spend my breaths on.

How many years go by before you realize that you have settled into a life that suddenly doesn’t feel like your own?  Has that awakening come for you yet?  Are you doing what it is that you have always dreamed of?  If not, have you thought about those dreams?  Have you written them down?

I think about such things all the time.  I dream of moving to a small town in the mountains somewhere or maybe to some historic town like Sainte Genevieve.  I’d want a little bit of land and a lot of peace and quiet.

Life should be slower than we’ve made it to be.  There is so little time to recognize the beautiful things that God has put here from the start.  We uproot the quiet places and replace them with cities.  Cities fill up with people who live only to get over on each other.  Before you know it, thoughts of how to protect what is ‘yours’ become instinct and habit.  All the while, anxiety and stress continue to build.  So we pop some pills and carry on.

This isn’t the life that I would choose if I was given the opportunity to start over.  No, I would build a life on a stretch of land surrounded by nature and serenity.  I would spend the evenings on the porch looking out over the landscape and listening to the sound of the earth.  I’d probably wear a dirty old hat too!  I’d be John Denver without the airplane and the golden voice.

It’s a dream that I still foster.  But when your life has already been built and responsibilities have already been adopted, it’s a difficult transition to fathom.  The difficulty is in the practical and the financial.  But I want to believe.

I want to believe that I won’t waste my entire life just doing what is there.  I hope I can break out and do what I dream before I’m too tired…

peace,
r