Aim For A New Point On The Horizon

While it’s important to carefully choose the story you tell yourself, it’s also important to accept reality and adjust as needed.

William Arthur Ward wrote…

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”

For our family, the breeze blew in pleasant directions for years.  One of my favorite pictures captures the essence of our life at about the fifteen-year mark: Ann, Amanda, and Rachel smiling at an all-family Christmas gathering, the girls in matching dresses that Ann had made.  While the photo didn’t capture the boys, it told of a time when our whole family was happy and healthy, loving and laughing.  We had energy to spare and were creating more memories than the Cabin Notebook could hold.  Life was sweet!

And the dreams Ann and I shared for the years to come were as strong as ever: dreams of Godly children living fulfilling lives; visions of a home full of happy, healthy grandchildren; expectations of deep marital bonding.

But I had my personal dreams, too: after-work hours spent putzing around our mini-farm; weekends filled with fishing and hunting and hiking; quality time with grandkids and close friends; traveling the world with Ann.  Now, I didn’t share all those dreams with Ann, mostly because I didn’t want to put them before hers.  Plus, we were still busy building our family; some things needed to wait, and I was okay with that.

Then the mental illness gale rolled in, and dreams began to drown.  Not only mine, but hers and our kids’, too.  Worse yet, I mourned the losses privately.

No—even worse was that I didn’t try to understand Ann’s pain!  That went on for years, and our marriage, our family, and our relationships suffered.  Only after we shared our highest hopes and deepest disappointments did we together begin to adjust our sails.  Now, that “sharing” wasn’t easy.  It took a lot of time, tears, and effort, and it required that we both listened more with our hearts than with our ears.

In the end, we learned how to bend and how to use those gale-force winds to propel us toward a different point on the horizon, a point that will be just as sweet (but in different ways), a point that we couldn’t have found if not for that noisy, powerful, deadly storm.

Today, we’re confident that when another gale rolls in (and it will!), we’ll adjust our sails to yet a different point in the distance.  Nonetheless, knowing even now that we’ll need to throw some dreams overboard is sobering, but we’ve learned that it’s better to arrive alive than not at all.

What point on the horizon are your sails set for?  If it’s one that threatens to tear your ship apart given the direction the winds are blowing right now, accept realty, adjust accordingly, and arrive alive!