For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." — Ephesians 2:10
Before You Read Sit With These Questions
These are for you. Before the article. Before the sermon. Just sit with them.
What did you want to be or do before life got practical and you talked yourself out of it?
When was the last time you thought about that dream and what did it feel like when you did?
What specific thing did you tell yourself that made you put it down? And where did that message come from?
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You know exactly what it is.
You don’t have to think hard to find it. It has been there for years sometimes quiet, sometimes louder in the moments when life slows down enough for you to hear things you usually drown out. The thing you wanted to do before you became responsible. Before the dream met the reality of your finances, your family, your time, your age, the voices that told you to be practical, to be realistic, to be grateful for what you have and stop reaching for things that probably weren’t meant for you anyway.
Maybe it was a creative thing. The book you’ve been meaning to write for fifteen years. The music you used to make before life crowded it out. The art that used to feel like breathing and now feels like a luxury you can’t afford. Maybe it was a calling the mission work, the ministry, the thing you felt drawn toward in your twenties that felt too idealistic to pursue in your thirties and too far gone to revisit in your forties.
Maybe it was something simpler than that simpler but no less real. The business. The degree. The move. The complete reinvention of a life that has become too small for the person you actually are.
Whatever it is you buried it. Carefully, responsibly, with good reasons. And it has been in the ground ever since. And occasionally, in the quiet moments, you feel the weight of it there. The thing that didn’t get to live.
This newsletter is about what to do with that.
Why We Bury Our Dreams
The reasons people bury their dreams are almost always the same, and almost always feel completely valid at the time.
It’s not practical. The finances don’t support it. The timing isn’t right. The responsibilities you carry don’t leave room for something that risky, that uncertain, that dependent on factors you can’t control.
It’s too late. You’re too old. Too established in a direction that’s already been set. Too many years have passed since the dream was fresh and possible. The window has closed.
You’re not good enough. Other people do this better than you would. The world doesn’t need another person attempting the thing you want to attempt not when there are people already doing it who are more talented, more trained, more equipped.
It’s selfish. The people who depend on you need the stable, responsible version of you not the version that is chasing something uncertain for their own fulfillment.
And then the most spiritual-sounding reason of all, and the one that is most often used to give theological cover to fear:
Maybe it wasn’t God’s plan for me after all.
Each of these reasons feels true when you’re inside them. And some of them contain real elements of truth. Timing matters. Responsibility matters. Wisdom about capacity matters.
But there is a difference between wisdom and fear. And many of the dreams that got buried were not buried by wisdom. They were buried by fear wearing wisdom’s clothing.
The Sermon: Handiwork, Not Accident
Ephesians 2:10 contains one of the most significant statements about human identity and purpose in all of Scripture and it is almost always underread because it sits in the shadow of the more famous verses around it.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
Handiwork. The Greek word is poiema from which we get the English word poem. You are God’s poem. His crafted work. Something He made with intention, with care, with specific design not mass-produced but individually conceived and constructed for a specific purpose.
And the works the things you were made to do were prepared in advance. Before you arrived. Before you made any choices. Before life shaped you into the person you became. God prepared specific works not generic good deeds available to anyone but specific things that fit the specific person He made when He made you.
This means your dreams the ones that align with how He made you, that fit the specific combination of gifts and passions and experiences that are uniquely yours are not accidental. They are not the irresponsible wishes of a person who needs to grow up and be practical. They may be the fingerprints of a God who designed you for something specific and planted the desire for it inside you as a compass pointing toward the thing you were made for.
Not all dreams are from God. Some are from ego, from comparison, from the desire to prove something or acquire something. Discernment matters.
But many of the dreams that got buried especially the ones that have persisted across years and decades, that keep surfacing in the quiet moments no matter how many times you push them back down are not accidental. They are not the residue of immaturity you haven’t grown out of. They are something planted by Someone who knew what He was making and why.
The Message
Here is what I want to say to the person who buried the dream because it felt too big:
The bigness was not the problem. The bigness was the point.
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God is not in the business of calling people to things that are perfectly within their natural capacity to achieve without Him. The pattern of Scripture is precisely the opposite He calls people to things that are too big for them, that require more than they have, that cannot be accomplished without His involvement. Moses couldn’t deliver Israel on his own. David couldn’t defeat Goliath on his own. Mary couldn’t carry the Son of God into the world on her own. The disciples couldn’t turn the world upside down on their own.
The bigness is not evidence that the dream is wrong. It may be evidence that the dream is right that it is the kind of thing that requires God’s involvement, and that His involvement is exactly what He was planning on when He planted the desire in you.
The practical objections are real. The timing matters. The responsibilities matter. The wisdom required to pursue a dream without blowing up a life matters.
But there is a difference between pursuing a dream wisely and not pursuing it at all. There is a difference between putting a dream on a realistic timeline and declaring it dead. There is a difference between being a responsible adult and being a person who has decided that the desires God planted in them are too inconvenient to take seriously.
You are not too old. Moses was eighty when God appeared to him in the burning bush. Abraham was seventy-five when God called him to leave everything. Anna was eighty-four when she recognized the Messiah in the temple and became one of the first people to proclaim who He was. God is not bound by your timeline and He has a long history of doing the most significant things in people’s lives in the seasons when they thought the window had closed.
You are not too ordinary. David was the youngest son, left in the field while his brothers were evaluated. Gideon was hiding in a winepress when the angel found him. Peter was a fisherman. The pattern of Scripture is not exceptional people living exceptional lives. It is ordinary people saying yes to an exceptional God and being astounded at what happens next.
The dream is not too big. You were made for something specific. And the God who made you for it is not intimidated by the gap between where you are and where the dream requires you to be.
What Happened When You Buried It
Something specific happens to a person when they bury a dream that was genuinely planted by God.
It doesn’t disappear. That is the first thing. The dream that was meant for you does not quietly go away when you decide to be practical. It goes underground and underground dreams have a way of pressing against the surface in ways that show up where you least expect them. In the restlessness that no amount of achievement in the wrong direction resolves. In the envy you feel specific, pointed envy when you see someone else doing the thing you buried. In the flatness of a life that is objectively fine but persistently feels like something is missing.
The restlessness is not ingratitude. The envy is not a character failure. The flatness is not depression or not only depression. They are signals. The dream is still there. Still pressing. Still waiting to know whether you’re going to come back for it.
And something else happens. When you bury the thing you were made for, a version of yourself gets buried with it. The person who writes didn’t stop existing when you stopped writing they went quiet. The person who creates or leads or builds or serves in the specific way they were designed to that person is still there, underneath the practical, responsible, realistic version you’ve been running.
They are waiting for you to come back.
What Coming Back Looks Like
Coming back to a buried dream does not always look like quitting your job and betting everything on a dramatic reinvention. For most people, in most situations, it looks much smaller and much more sustainable than that.
It looks like beginning. Quietly. Without telling everyone. Without needing it to be fully formed or publicly validated before it’s real. One hour a week. One page. One step in the direction of the thing not the finished version of the thing but the beginning of it.
It looks like treating the dream as something worth taking seriously enough to give it real time and real attention rather than the leftover minutes after everything else is handled. The person who waits for the perfect time will wait forever. The person who begins with the imperfect time they actually have the early morning, the lunch break, the Saturday hour before the family wakes up is the one who finds out whether the dream is real.
It looks like bringing it to God honestly. Not presenting it as a petition grant me this dream but as a conversation. Lord, this is what I’ve wanted for a long time and I’ve been afraid to take it seriously. Is this from You? Help me know. And if it is help me find the courage and the wisdom to begin.
It looks like being willing to start small enough that failure is survivable. The person who insists on beginning at scale, with everything on the line, is using perfectionism as a reason not to begin at all. Start smaller than you think the dream deserves. Start where you are. With what you have. Today.
And it looks like accepting that the path from buried dream to living dream is not a straight line. It is slow, nonlinear, full of setbacks and recalibrations and moments where the practical reality of pursuing the thing is significantly less romantic than the dream of pursuing the thing. The people who see their dreams become real are not the ones who had the best ideas. They are the ones who kept going after the initial inspiration wore off and the real work began.
A Real Story
James had wanted to be a writer since he was twelve years old. By thirty-five he was a regional sales manager with a mortgage, three kids, and approximately zero time for anything that didn’t pay the bills.
He hadn’t written anything in eight years. He told himself the season for that had passed. That it was an adolescent fantasy. That the responsible thing was to be grateful for the stable life he’d built.
But the dream kept pressing. He’d read something that moved him and feel the ghost of the person he’d buried. He’d see a book in a store and feel the specific, pointed ache of the thing he hadn’t done.
At thirty-eight, he gave himself one hour on Saturday mornings. Before anyone woke up. Just one hour and a cup of coffee and a document that no one else could see.
Four years later he had a manuscript. Not a perfect one. But a real one. The thing that had been buried for twenty years, dug up and brought into the light one Saturday morning at a time.
He said: I spent years telling myself it was too late and I wasn’t good enough and the timing wasn’t right. And all of those things were true they were just not the most important true things. The most important true thing was that God made me to do this and I was the only one who could decide whether I was going to do it or not.
He started. That was the whole thing. He started.
Closing Journal Prompts
Name the dream. The specific one. The one you buried. Write it down the full version, not the minimized, practical version. What was it really?
What exactly did you tell yourself when you buried it and where did that message come from? Who taught you that this wasn’t for you?
What would you attempt if you knew the bigness of it was the point rather than the problem?
What is the smallest possible beginning one hour, one step, one honest conversation with God about it that you could take this week?
Today’s Prayer:Lord, I buried something that I think You planted. I called it being practical and responsible and realistic and some of that was wisdom. But some of it was fear. Fear that it was too big. That I wasn’t good enough. That the window had closed.
That wanting something so specific for myself was somehow selfish or faithless. Today I am digging it back up. Not with a plan or a timeline or a certainty about how it works out just with an open hand. Here it is. The thing I’ve wanted for longer than I can remember. Is it from You? Show me. And if it is give me the courage to begin. Not perfectly. Not at scale. Just to begin. One step in the direction of the thing You made me for. I trust You with what comes next. Amen.
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