Hold Your Dreams Loosely — The Spacious Place

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. ”

— Ecclesiastes 1:14

Something happened when I turned 50. I started to see the world differently. Fifty isn’t a magic number, but I suppose the realization that you have almost certainly passed the halfway point in your life (and maybe you’re well beyond it) does something to your perspective.

I began to care less about what other people think of me. I began to value relationships more. And a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes began to make a lot more sense. Meaningless! Meaningless!…Utterly meaningingless! Everything is meaningless (Ecc 1:2).

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not caught in the depths of a mental health crisis. I’ve been been down that path, but that’s not what’s happening now. I’m actually okay. This feels more like a new awareness, a deeper understanding.

As a young Christian, my understanding of that famous opening to Ecclesiastes was superficial at best. I recognized that accumulating wealth and possessions is not what matters most, but I would have ascribed significant meaning to a number of other things in my life that I view differently now. Academics, politics, career. At that stage in my life, the verse screamed of hopelessness. It doesn’t anymore.

There’s nothing wrong with having goals or desiring to make a difference. The world needs people who work for the good of society and those who build the Kingdom of God. But we must not believe that our achievements make us any more valuable as individuals, and we must always be aware of the reasons behind our motivation.

God places dreams on our hearts, and I am grateful for that. Our dreams can be a wonderful source of inspiration and creativity. But I also know we have a human tendency to want to take control of those dreams—forgetting they do not belong to us alone, grasping them so tightly we leave no space for God’s direction.

Holding our dreams loosely allows God to guide us in ways we may not have imagined.

I recently visited a remarkable historic home located on an island in the St. Lawrence River along the U.S.–Canada border. Built at the turn of the 20th century, Boldt Castle is a monument to the Gilded Age, celebrating the ideals of the American dream and human industriousness. The home’s owner was George C. Boldt, the proprietor of New York’s famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel. A German immigrant and a self-made man, Boldt knew how to put his dreams into action.

The castle and its surrounding gardens are magnificent, but I was stunned to discover no one actually ever lived there. The reason is sobering. Boldt had planned to present the castle as a gift to his beloved wife Louise on Valentine’s Day 1904, but in January of that year Louise died unexpectedly. Boldt stopped all construction and never visited the island again. The house sat derelict, exposed to the elements, for 73 years.

Upon hearing this tragic story, one thing came to mind:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for little while and then vanishes (James 4:13-14).

George Boldt had a beautiful, if excessive, plan to express his love for his wife, but his status and wealth could not prevent tragedy. This is a hard lesson. All of our plans and strategies, our dreams and human triumphs, are nothing more than mist. They cannot last for eternity.

But don’t mistake this for hopelessness. The hope we have in Christ, as Hebrews 6:19 reminds us, is “an anchor for the soul.”

All that does not transcend this life is ultimately meaningless. When the things of this world lose their luster, we see the eternal more clearly. We cannot avoid disappointment and suffering, but we can hold fast to the things of God—and there we discover lasting peace.

As I ponder the often perplexing overlap between the temporal and the eternal that we experience in this life, I continually come back to this verse:

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13).

When nothing else in this world satisfies, we can always place our hope in God’s eternal love. Just as George Boldt’s remarkable monument to his wife will not last, nor could their earthly lives, his love for her remains.

Our love for God. Our love for one another. God’s love for us. These things transcend time and space. It is why Jesus says the greatest commandment is “to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). This is where true meaning and the satisfaction of all our longings is found, the ultimate fulfillment of our noblest dreams.

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