Give God Your Sad

It’s been 4 years ago this week that I watched my dream get torn apart piece by piece. Quite literally. I was preparing to vacate the building I was leasing for my gym. A couple years previously, I had watched each day as my contractors transformed an old bank into my dream…my gym. It was painstaking to watch as my friends helped me remove my wood floors, slat by slat. It was endearing and gut wrenching all at once to see them carefully removing the mirrors off the walls. The mirrors were important - every good gym must have good mirrors. This was a corner I refused to cut.

And over the course of President’s Day week of 2013 I watched my dream get ripped apart piece by piece.

To be honest, I never really processed that event. Closing my business was not optional. My children needed me. This was the only choice. And I was consumed with doing what I had to do to protect my children, so while it was painful in the moment, the pain I was experiencing with my children was far greater. That was the pain that got my attention, that demanded my attention.

But these few years later, it seems the memories come flooding back. My children are on mid winter break now as they were then. They accompanied me each day to the gym and watched as my friends helped me tear it apart. I think some days I was too much of a basket case and just sat and watched my friends work with tears in my eyes and the reality of it not really setting in.

Have you ever watched your dream get torn apart right in front of your eyes? Maybe it was a marriage or other relationship, or an illness or addiction, a child that went astray. It’s excruciating and it begs to be processed. It begs to be felt, really felt. We can try to push it aside and distract ourselves with other things but what I have learned with the loss of this dream…and other dreams that have died a painful death…is that the pain always surfaces again, demanding our attention.

Why does this hurt so much? We like to think time heals all wounds but it doesn’t. We think that if enough time goes by it will hurt less. It won’t. Usually with the passing of time we find ourselves wandering aimlessly from distraction to distraction and every so often we feel that pain and do everything in our power to push past it. No one wants to feel it. It’s PAIN, pain hurts.

Four years later and I can feel the pain like it’s fresh as the day it all happened. I remember how sad I was to see my dream slipping away and knowing that I had no choice but to let it go. I remember realizing in that moment 4 years ago that I did not have time to be sad about closing my gym, I was fighting for my babies. I had to be strong. Breaking down in grief was not optional.

Why am I so sad? I’ve wondered this for days. I never got to be sad over the death of my dream. I think our sadness stays within us until we can process it and give it to God and let it go. The Bible tells us that God has a good plan for us (Jer 29:11) and that God works all things for good (Romans 8:28) but I think that in order to get these good things that God wants us to have, we have to be ready and willing to give Him our sad stuff. We have to be ready to give up the past and the life that we had planned so that we have empty hands to able to receive the good He wants to give us.