Old dreams can come true.
I shared in an earlier blog that for over a decade I have dreamed of building an art studio on Camano Island to showcase my family’s artistic legacy and support my dad and mom in their later years.
This week I came across a 2008 notebook our family made on our summer vacation. I discovered in it some sketches I had made of my dream studio, sketches that are eerily like the Studio that Jim Spane is going to build.
Presently I am finishing getting paperwork to our mortgage banker. Then we will see what the assessed value of the proposed building and property is, and, based on that, the size of mortgage we can get.
I’m definitely on new ground here. I have never had anything this scale built. But I am undaunted. This dream has burned in my heart for over a decade, and, by God’s grace, I will see it through to the end.
After all, old dreams burn deep in the heart, smoldering there unto the appointed time has come.
Having shared with us the shifts of tectonic proportions and the wrenching process of coming to the place of accepting God’s calling to pastor Redeemer, Redmond, now allowing you to move into another phase of this old dream, I am fascinated by what the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue said about change in one of his last interviews before his death in 2008. The interview was aired earlier in August on On Being. Below, a short except.
“… in the world of spirit, time behaves differently. When I used to be a priest, it was an amazing thing, you’d see somebody who’d be dying over a week maybe, and had lived maybe a hard life where they were knuckled into themselves, where they were hard and tight and unyielding and everything had to earn its way to their center. And suddenly then, within three or four days you’d see them loosen, and you’d see a kind of buried beauty that they’d never allowed themselves to enjoy about themselves to surface and bring a radiance to their face and spirit. Suddenly there was a recognition that the time was over and that their way of being could no longer help them with this, and that another way of being was being invited from them. And when they yielded to it, it would become transformative. When you change time levels, things can transform rather quickly.
I always think that that is the secret of change, that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we’re not even aware of, and then sometimes when we come to a threshold, crossing over which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.”