Our Dreams and Ambitions are Divine Gifts

(Written February 8, 2008)

I had a conversation with someone the other day who told me they wanted to be an actor and a musician. They also told me that it would be difficult to achieve those ambitions and be an active member of the church at the same time. For this reason, they will be pursuing a different career path. While I can see how that concern may be real, and perhaps even justified, I couldn't help but feel a little sad about how that conversation went. I can't imagine that it was intended that living the standards of the church would ever get in the way of our dreams coming true. In fact, if anything, living the standards should help! In my opinion--with all the obstacles out there--we, ourselves, are often the biggest ones. If we choose to allow our standards to act as obstacles, rather than stepping stones, that is our own fault.

I remember when I was still able to attend Institute of Religion, before I started working nights, our instructor told us that he strongly believes that our dreams and ambitions are given to us by God, and that we have these dreams for a reason. This philosophy has since become a critical part of my core beliefs.

There's more going on here than the concern that achieving our ambitions may require us to compromise our morals. It's very easy to get to a place where we believe we are simply not good enough to ever live the life we want. I have been there many times, as I believe most of us have. There's also the tendency to work towards a goal, run into obstacles that are seemingly impossible to overcome, and then we convince ourselves that it's too hard to go on and we finally give up. What we seem to be forgetting though, is that our innermost righteous desires were indeed given to us by a Higher Hand, and that, by implication, there must be a way to accomplish them. There just has to be!

There is yet another challenge that most of us will go through. Unfortunately, there are people out there who seem to derive a sick kind of joy out of tearing us down. They will encourage the feeling--that may already be there--that we're not good enough, and that we should give up. There is a feeling that going after our dreams is a waste of time. I've actually had some people tell me that I shouldn't try for things as hard as I do, because I'm just going to end up disappointing myself. That is completely false! Disappointments may come, yes. But I'd much rather engage in the pursuit of happiness and be disappointed, than just submit myself to this false idea that life is just made up of miserable could-have-beens.

All my life, there have been many times when it seemed as though my ambitions were going to fall apart. And just as I was about to give up, the very next day, they would come to fruition. This actually began at the very beginning of my life, although it wasn't technically my ambition, just because I was too young to understand what was going on. Medically speaking, I really shouldn't be alive right now. When I was born, during labor, all of my limbs broke, and there was a great risk that more bones would break. My bones, at the time, were so brittle that they had to carry me on pillows for fear that they would break me had they used their hands. The situation was so bad that the doctors had actually told my parents that I probably wouldn't live past the first two weeks of my life. Well, obviously, they were wrong. At the time, it seemed pretty hopeless, but my dad decided to give me a Priesthood blessing. In it, he said that I would live a full life. Sometimes, I like to imagine that as a premortal spirit, right before I came to this world, I had ambitions of living a full, healthy life. And here I am 27 years later, doing just that.

If the purpose of why we're here is to experience joy--and I believe that's true--then doesn't it make sense that our ambitions and dreams are actually supernal gifts, designed to steer us towards that blissful end result? Every single day, there may be obstacles that will stand in our way, but in my mind, it seems completely pointless to give up on account of today. What a waste it would be to go through the rest of this life dreaming of a life that could be, instead of living that dream! The truth is, I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow, and neither do you. That should give us comfort and hope rather than fear and despair.