When I was 9, I was convinced I was headed for Olympic ice. I watched Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan on a boxy TV in my childhood living room and absorbed the message kids always absorb: If you want something badly enough, it can become your life.
A few years later, I traded skates for a karaoke machine and started recording “albums” in my bedroom, microphone clipped to the plastic stand. I wrote lyrics in a journal with scented gel pens and sang like someone might actually discover me. I didn’t just want to sing. I wanted to be a Christian pop star.
Then theater took over. I started performing young, won scholarships and chose a path that could plausibly end under stage lights. Broadway wasn’t a hobby. It was the destination. And I believed it with the same stubborn certainty I’d had about the Olympics.
I’ve had plenty of dreams.
Some faded on their own. Others were dreams I felt God asking me to release, even when I didn’t want to. Some required grief.
And the one I’ve carried the longest is the dream of marriage.
Not as a vague someday. As a real picture: being a wife, being a mom, building a life with someone who knows the most honest parts of you and doesn’t flinch. It’s a dream that can feel almost embarrassingly simple until you realize how much Christian culture treats it like an inevitability. Like a reward for doing life “right.”
I don’t know if I will ever marry. I hope I will. But God has never promised marriage, and that sentence lands like something you can nod at in public while privately feeling like it’s been stapled to your chest.
Even if marriage is still in my future, I’ve realized there are dreams I still have to bury.
I never imagined I’d be single at 28. Not because 28 is ancient, but because it’s old enough to feel the distance between what you expected and what you have. Old enough to watch the weddings stack up on your feed. Old enough to answer, “No, not seeing anyone,” like it’s small talk.
I will never be the 24-year-old bride. I will never be the 28-year-old holding her newborn. That isn’t my story. It was my dream.
There is the life we planned for. There is the life we expected. Then there is the life that actually shows up.
Maybe yours matches what you pictured. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe your life has a scar down the middle of it. Maybe you lost someone and the calendar never recovered. Maybe the job you thought would stabilize you keeps slipping sideways. Maybe the diagnosis changed everything. Maybe you’re counting months and cycles and trying not to spiral. Maybe your marriage is harder than you were prepared for. Maybe anxiety has made your world feel smaller than it should be. Maybe you’re watching a parent fade in slow motion. Maybe your dreams aren’t delayed. Maybe they’re gone.
“Occasionally weep deeply over the life you hoped would be,” John Piper said. “Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God. And embrace the life you have.”
There’s something bracing about that. Not because it’s cold, but because it refuses to pretend grief is a detour. It treats grief like part of discipleship. It says to tell the truth about what you lost, then keep walking, because God is still God.
So yes, weep. Grieve what is not and may never be. Grieve the life you wanted.
Then trust.
Trust God for a new dream.
“My heart was saying, ‘Lord, take away this longing, or give me that for which I long,’” Elisabeth Elliot said. “The Lord was answering, ‘I must teach you to long for something better.’”
That’s the prayer I recognize. Either fix this or numb it, God, because it hurts too much to want what I don’t have. The longing itself starts to feel like suffering. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and it’s not poetic when you’re living it. It’s just true.
And still, Elliot’s line refuses to let longing be the final authority. It suggests God doesn’t always erase desire because sometimes desire is doing its job. It’s revealing what we worship. It’s exposing what we’ve mistaken for salvation.
There is nothing wrong with wanting marriage. There is nothing wrong with wanting a family. Those are good desires. God invented covenant. God invented home. But good desires become crushing when they start carrying the weight only God can carry.
Sometimes what needs to change isn’t the dream. It’s the expectation that the dream will rescue you.
Philippians 4:13 is a verse Christians love to slap on everything, usually as a spiritual energy drink: I can do all things, therefore I can do this hard thing and win at it.
But Paul isn’t writing about winning. He’s writing about contentment. If you zoom out, he said, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.”
Learned. Not discovered. Learned the way you learn a language, through repetition and failure and practice.
He continued: “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Paul was talking about surviving scarcity and surviving success without being ruled by either. That’s the context for the famous line. It isn’t bravado. It’s endurance. Christ supplies the strength to hold your life without white-knuckling it.
Contentment is learned. And like most things we have to learn, it’s humbling. It doesn’t come naturally. It tends to arrive in the exact seasons we wish we could skip.
But contentment doesn’t mean pretending you don’t want what you want. It means your wanting no longer gets to be your god. It means your unmet dreams don’t get the final word on whether God is good.
Through Christ who strengthens us, we can grieve without being swallowed. We can tell the truth about what hurts without turning pain into a personality. We can mourn the life we thought we’d have while trusting God’s character isn’t up for negotiation.
And through Christ who strengthens us, we can open our hands again.
Maybe a new dream looks like a calling you didn’t see coming. Maybe it looks like friendship that becomes family. Maybe it looks like faithfulness in a story that still feels unfinished.
Or maybe the “new dream” isn’t a replacement at all.
Maybe the new dream is God Himself.
Not as a consolation prize. Not as the thing you settle for when the “real” dream doesn’t show. As the only One who can hold you without eventually failing you. The only One whose love doesn’t depend on timing or chemistry or whether your life looks impressive from the outside.
So occasionally grieve your dreams.
Let it be honest. Let it be real.
Then, by God’s grace, wash your face. Take the next step. Hold His hand, and by His grace, through His strength, learn to want Him most, because only He is strong enough to hold the weight of your life.
