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It has been said that most journeys begin with a single step. Truthfully, the journey begins with a dream.
Let me introduce myself a little bit. I’m a mid-thirties woman. I’ve been married now for 13 years and I have two children, a boy (11) and a girl (8), as well as Dear Husband (same age as me). I come from a family of three (I’m the eldest), and my parents are full-time in the ministry. We started in a rather large city in Eastern Pennsylvania, then moved to a larger city in Western Pennsylvania. Most of my life was lived in upstate New York, north of Albany, and Southern New Jersey.
After DH and I got married and both kids were born, we moved to North Carolina for a while, then finally to Florida, where we live now. And between North Carolina and Florida, my Homestead Dream began to take shape.
Enough about me. More about me.
We attend a country church now, a very old one filled with old-school farming families. I fell in love with it, with the whole idea. I spend hours daydreaming of my own little hobby farm. I bought books about raising chickens, goats, and alpaca. I filled countless pinterest boards with my daydreaming.
DH and I spent time talking about it, and he’s on my side. He likes the idea along with me, however, the dream has needed to adapt. Our children are still young, and their needs come first for both of us.
And I guess that’s what I want to talk about: the waiting. The willingness to wait. We don’t live in a culture right now that encourages patience. Most of what we want, we get by overnight delivery. We get mad about traffic, or late Uber Eats orders, or Amazon packages running behind. Waiting just isn’t what we, as a culture, excel at. Patience is a dying virtue.
Colossians 3:12 says, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” I had an interesting thought about this the other day, as I was listening to some old music I used to play for my kids when they were small. “Patience waits and is not sad,” the lyrics sang.
Looking at that list of attributes from Colossians, I find it interesting that patience is at the end. Compassion, as Bob the Tomato said, is noticing that someone needs help and wanting to help them. Kindness is “nice to others” (lyrics from the same song about patience). Humility, as near as I can tell, is the willingness to accept that someone might be different than you are, but just as valuable, and gentleness “knows how to listen” (more lyrics from that song). So, putting all that together, I can extrapolate: “As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, prepare yourselves for the day by training yourself to see someone and want to help them, treating them nicely, recognizing their value, listening to them, and waiting for them without becoming anxious.”
But how does this apply to waiting on a dream? How do we take from a rundown of how we should approach other people and point it toward a goal?
What if we treated that goal as a person?
How would we see that goal and try to help it? How could we treat it with kindness and recognize its value? How do we listen to it, and wait without becoming anxious or annoyed?
I will submit that ‘seeing a goal and trying to help it’ means preparation. It means breaking up this goal into steps that can be taken softly, easily. Perhaps it means learning a little bit at a time and stowing away that knowledge for later, when the goal finally blossoms.
With that in mind, that’s what I’m planning to do here. I hope to make this Journey of Dreams a kind of diary of my journey toward my Homestead Dream, of the things I plan to learn to do (like crochet and can my own food), as well as the things I learn from the journey itself, like patience.
I hope you will join me on this Journey.
