My mind is focused tonight on dreams forgotten.  Or perhaps dreams displaced.  When I was a young girl, elementary-school aged, I wanted to be an opera singer.  Or at least I pretended to be one.  I would go around the house singing in a soprano, completely affected, vibrato.  In reality, my interpretation of opera was part Sandi Patty and part Evie (both artists which my dad listened to incessantly on our record player/ piece of 1970s furniture).  While I was painfully shy as a kid, I was a total ham in front of my family.  Go figure.  But my dad was my biggest fan.  He pushed me to sing in front of people besides my immediate family, even when I struggled for my own voice.  He told me often that I had the purest voice he had ever heard.

Then, as an adolescent, I vacillated between being a writer (in my most vulnerable, self-aware moments, a poet) and a clinical psychologist in the penal system (I loved the study of the human mind, and where can you find more messed up people but in prison?).  I did somewhat pursue writing in college as a mass communications major with a public relations focus.  But the grind of working behind a desk at a newspaper office deterred me from seriously pursuing a writing career.  And perhaps my lack of confidence in my abilities….  With singing, I can honestly say that I didn’t major in music (at a university that had a top-notch music program) or try out for the esteemed Anderson Chorale because I didn’t have the confidence to believe that I was good enough to do it.

The question that is foremost in my mind tonight is when did I make a pact with the enemy to rob me of either of those dreams?  That lack of self-confidence did not come from my Father, my Creator who knows me intimately and made me who I am. He knows what I am capable of, and, most importantly, He planted certain desires within my heart.  How could I bargain that away?  While I know that God has and is using my writing abilities in my chosen profession, there is still a part of me that is saddened by the thought that I didn’t pursue writing as my sole career.  Just like I am saddened that there is no place for a late-30-something singer who still loves to sing in the shower or with the radio but can never again sing like she did in her 20s.

I am done with false pacts.  I pray every day that God would reveal to me those pacts that I have made outside of and without Him.  And I pray that He would restore to me, even in small ways, these creative outlets that I love, that my soul craves.  Even if it’s for an audience of one (for example, my cat, while I play my keyboard in my meditation room) or a few (like on this blog).