Keep Going

Yesterday I announced that I’ve begun a new writing project.

It’s a much larger project than I first imagined.

As I worked through some of the details, a thought crept in:

This is going to be hard.

Hard because it will take longer than I expected.

Hard because there are far more moving parts than I realized.

For just a moment, I found myself wondering,

Do I really want to do this?

It’s funny.

My last post “A land That I Will Lead You was about having the courage to take the next step.

Then, almost immediately, I was questioning whether I wanted to take it.

That night I had a dream.

I was with my father, my mother, and one of my brothers. I was telling them that maybe I should find something else to do.

But another thought interrupted me.

What else would I do?

At this point in my life, what would I start over with?

Each of them gave me the same answer.

“You need to keep going.”

Later in the dream, I was standing in another room and overheard them talking about me.

One of them said,

“He needs to keep going.”

Another replied,

“He’s still lacking confidence. He needs that confidence so he can keep going.”

Then I woke up.

I lay there wondering whether I had really been so discouraged by the size of the project that I was already preparing to quit.

Maybe that moment of doubt revealed something deeper than the project itself.

Maybe it revealed the place where I most needed encouragement.

For me, I believe God used that dream to provide it.

The project hasn’t become any easier.

It will still take months

It will be far more involved than I imagined.

But this morning I made up my mind.

I’ll keep going.

Sometimes the biggest obstacle isn’t the work ahead.

It’s believing the work is worth finishing.