Like a Child

Do you remember your childhood fantasy?
“When I grow up I want to be a …”
Elementary schools nationwide obsess over a child’s drive toward a future occupation or life-goal. Journal entry after journal entry is written upon, or in Kindergarten, each journal picture is drawn depicting your childhood fantasies. Some pursue those childhood fantasies. “When I was little I wanted to be a Sunday School Teacher,” Carla told me a few weeks ago as she set out chairs for the Miamisburg “Daniel” Bible Study. And yet others merely laugh at their old dreams and ambitions, tossing them to the dusty path of past memories.

When I was little, I, like every other Kindergarten child, wanted to be a teacher. And then I wanted to be any other number of things from a writer to a world-famous babysitter.

Oh yes, there are dreams that have “matured” through the years… At four, I wanted to be a mother of sixteen children. As I grew older my dreams “matured” and I wanted to be a mother of ten, then eight, then four, then three, then four, then eight, and now six children. [I know, I know… I’m crazy and every other comment that you think I haven’t heard and yet have already heard regarding everyone else’s opinion of how I should run this life of “mine.”]

But there is one dream that grew with me and that I haven’t lost… but still hangs in the future, regardless of whether or not it will ever come near. This dream stirs silly childhood, “I can do anything” thoughts. The “I can excel if I put my mind to it” thoughts that come with chocolate milk mustaches. The “I actually could do this,” thoughts that come with experience.

---Yes, world, I’m a dreamer. ---

I wish I could describe the high I felt standing in my purple dress in front of the Jr. High parents. Or that true high, after giving my life to the Lord, that I felt while praying that God would use me from a 45 degree angled big wooden bed as I awaited my first high school musical entrance chords. Or that feeling of looking into the peering faces as I sat on the stage extension, stacking harmonies with a friend. Or the high of standing, with knocking knees, before my high school youth group and strumming my first few chords of worship. Or the feeling of stepping away from the microphone sophomore year of college and hearing a sea of voices carry the chorus of “How Great is Our God.” I wish I could describe the high of standing in the recording studio, with my favorite person to sing with standing beside me. The tension pulsed through me as we “sang like we always do,” but this time with a different, one-shot-take audience. I wish I could describe the complete assurance of who you were created to be of standing in a dark room, releasing the very pit of who you are with a group of teenagers and a few buzzing chords.

It’s weird how God has taken me from desiring the fame of my name to desiring His Fame. And yet He has used the same tool all these years.

It’s weird, but I really don’t feel that He is finished with that tool yet. In fact, the child within me leaps at the thought of what He could do with a willing pair of hands.


And what He already has done…