This month marks 24 or  25 years at my job. I always get confused. Let’s just say a quarter of a century.

I’m grateful. I really am.

This job has put food on my table, helped pay mortgages and medical bills, carried me through cancer, raised children, celebrated grandchildren, and kept the lights on through seasons I never saw coming.

It has been a gift. But if I’m honest…

The thought made me pull the blanket back over my head and wish I was in kindergarten again.

No sales quotas. No deadlines. No responsibilities.

Just nap time, chocolate milk, and somebody else deciding what came next.

Instead, I lay there thinking about twenty-five years. I was thankful. But I was grieving too.

Not because I hated my job. I didn’t. Well not exactly. Lol

I was mourning the woman I thought I would have become by now. The books I thought I would have written. The places I imagined speaking. The dreams I assumed would have happened “one day.”

Somewhere between providing for everyone else and simply surviving life, I quietly convinced myself those dreams could wait.

Then I looked up… and decades had passed.

As I lay there feeling sorry for myself, the Lord interrupted my thoughts with a simple question.

“Who told you I was finished writing your story?”

I couldn’t answer. Because the truth is…

Dead dreams don’t keep showing up. They don’t whisper while you’re driving to work. They don’t find you while you’re digging in a garden. They don’t keep tapping you on the shoulder through devotionals, stories, and moments that won’t leave you alone.

Maybe I wasn’t mourning dead dreams. Maybe I was grieving the timeline I had written for God.

The older I get, the more I’m discovering that God isn’t nearly as concerned with my schedule as I am. He wastes nothing. Not the years. Not the detours.

Not the job that faithfully provided while quietly teaching me lessons I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. Looking back, maybe I wasn’t just building a career.

Maybe God was building a writer. A storyteller. A woman with enough life behind her to recognize His fingerprints in places she once overlooked.

This morning I wanted to hide under the covers like a kindergartener hoping the day would go away. Instead, God reminded me that I’m not in kindergarten anymore.

I’m still in His classroom.

And apparently…

The lesson isn’t over yet.

“Being confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
— Philippians 1:6

Love, Chelle
DefyGravityWithoutWings.com