When You Sacrifice the Present for a Future Dream

Dreams are a beautiful thing.  Without them life would be a bit stagnant, don't you think?

It's important to challenge ourselves to work toward something – a financial goal, a fitness goal, a household project  – and then to dream about how reaching that goal will make our life better.

But what if your attention gets focused on that dream and you completely lose sight of the present?

This blog earns a little bit of money for our family.  What a blessing to be able to sit down and write the things that are on my heart and then to see trickles of money coming in because of it!

At the beginning of last year, I set what I thought was a completely laughable goal for what I hoped this blog would earn for our family for the year.  But God has ways of surprising us, and the goal was met above and beyond.

Knowing how much had come in without my even trying, I set some much bigger goals for this year and tried to be a little bit more intentional about reaching them.

We have family dreams, and we're using the income from this blog to hopefully reach them one day.  We dream of owning a larger house where we can all fit inside without tripping over each other and getting irritated because of it.  We dream of owning property where the kids can run and play freely without fear of being run over by a car.

Knowing the potential income there is in blogging, the fulfillment of those dreams seems quite near, especially if I keep working on the plans I've laid.

But I keep coming back to this thought:

I don't want to sacrifice the present for a future dream.

I don't want to be so full of starry-eyed dreams of spacious houses and country property that I ignore the very thing that would make that house and property so precious – the people living there.

The thing that makes dreams so special is the people that are in them.

I don't want to use up all my days working toward a future dream when the present is passing me by each hour.

Each hour that passes while I create products and answer emails and crunch numbers is an hour that my children have grown older.  It's an hour that I missed playing catch and reading books and taking walks.

It's an hour that I can never retrieve.

I don't think anyone should abandon their dreams and stop reaching for goals.  If we reach our family goals, it will actually enable us to spend more time together as a family.  There is even the possibility that my husband could quit his job and we could work together on homeschooling and running this website.

But that's in the future.  And in the meantime I can't bring myself to give up precious hours with my children just to reach that goal.

So I'll keep reaching for that goal – one teeny, tiny, sparest-of-spare moments at a time.  But I won't allow it to take over my days or preoccupy my thoughts.

I don't know what your dream is – maybe it's getting a work-at-home business off the ground, growing your blog a little bigger, writing a book – but is it worth the sacrifice of the present?

Will you wish someday that you hadn't made your dreams so much of a priority that you sacrificed the present?

Will you realize that you had been present physically but your mind was far away as you made goals and plans?

Why don't you change course before it's too late?

Don't find yourself wishing you could go back and relive the hours you wasted.

You may never live to see the future, so what is the sense in living there?

Be present in the present.