When Your Dreams Die Early (Remember They May Be Resurrected)

Have you ever worked hard at something you thought God was calling you to do--a relationship, a conversation, a book, a ministry--and it was met with near total silence? It's so frustrating--you thought you were being obedient, and your efforts died an early death. Here's an encouraging thought. We worship and serve a God of resurrection. If that dream was truly borne of Him, He has a history and a practice of taking old things and making them become new. I got to experience that last week and want to share about it.

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Have you ever felt God call you to do something, you do it, and it’s met with…silence? It’s so excruciating. You thought you were supposed to have that conversation, pursue that relationship, preach that sermon, write that book, but your best efforts were swallowed up by apathy. Nobody cared.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you failed or that God didn’t call you to do it. Here’s the thing: you don’t know how it all ends yet. Dreams may appear to die, but we worship a God of resurrection.

One of my most frustrating publishing projects was Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul. It’s a book about the connection between body care and discipleship. It’s not a how-to book about health and fitness. Rather, it’s about the motivation for fitness—us wanting to be “a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21). I wrote the book in 2010 and it was published in 2011.

While I have a long (twenty-five-year) and grateful history with Zondervan publishers, this was among the most frustrating experiences I’ve had there because the book was acquired by a team that loved the idea, but by the time the book came out, there was an entirely new team onboard that thought there simply wasn’t a market for the book, so they pulled virtually all of the marketing dollars. In their view, people who already valued fitness wouldn’t read such a book because they were already motivated, and people who didn’t value physical fitness wouldn’t want to read a book that might make them feel guilty.