When the Dream Dies
Some dreams you choose. Others choose you.
I was in sixth grade when I knew. Not the vague “I want to help people someday” kind of knowing. This was a very specific, settled, this-is-what-I’m-built-for kind of knowing. I wanted to be a pastor. I wanted to stand in front of people and tell them the truth about God and watch it change things. I carried that dream through middle school and high school and college and seminary. I protected it. I built my whole life around it.
So when my first call into ministry finally came, I walked through that door with everything I had.
And in one conversation, it was made clear I wasn’t wanted there.
I won’t tell you who said it or exactly how it was said. What I’ll tell you is that it landed like a wrecking ball. All those years of preparation, all of the certainty, all that carefully carried hope. And the first person who was supposed to welcome me into the work I’d dreamed of since sixth grade made it clear the welcome wasn’t real.
I wasn’t equipped to handle it then the way I would be now. I was quiet. Passive. The kind of person who absorbed things instead of addressing them. I didn’t push back. I didn’t advocate for myself. I just went to work and tried to survive it.
Nearly three years in that environment. Three years that could have ended everything.
But they didn’t. Not because it was easy. Something was happening in that crucible that I couldn’t see at the time. The passive, conflict-avoiding person I walked in as was slowly, painfully becoming someone else. You don’t develop backbone in comfortable conditions. You develop it by surviving the places that try to break you. I came out the other side different. Harder in the right places. More certain of the calling even though, maybe even because, it had nearly been taken from me.
I thought that was the hard part. I didn’t know the harder part was still ahead.
Years later I helped plant a church. And if the first story is about a dream almost dying before it started, this one is about a dream that lived, really lived, and then had to be buried anyway.
I loved those people. That’s the only way to say it that’s true. Not the general pastoral love you’re supposed to have for a congregation. This was the specific, earned, show-up-for-each-other kind that grows when you build something together from nothing. Families. Kids. People who had never set foot in a church finding their way in. Lives genuinely changed. I watched it happen up close and it was everything I had hoped ministry could be.
We poured years into it. Hours that don’t fit on a spreadsheet. Money that came from places you don’t want to think about too hard. And faith, the particular kind of faith that keeps you going when the numbers aren’t where you need them to be and the momentum stalls and you tell yourself next month, next season, next year.
And then the economy shifted. People moved. The pace never got where it needed to go and the size never followed. And at some point you have to face the thing you’ve been trying not to face. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. Not because you failed. Not because the vision was wrong or the effort was insufficient or the faith was too small. Sometimes the ground moves underneath something you’re building faithfully and there’s nothing left to do but grieve it.
Closing that church was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not because of what I was losing, although that was real. The real pain was because of what they were losing. When you’re the leader you carry everyone else’s grief on top of your own.
You have to be the steady voice for people who are looking to you to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. You shake hands and speak words and hold it together. And then later, much later, you feel what it actually cost you.
At some point most of us will stand in front of a closed door. Maybe you’re standing in front of one right now. A career that collapsed. A relationship that didn’t survive. A vision you gave everything to that didn’t make it. And you’re standing there feeling exactly what I felt. Feeling that specific, hollowing combination of grief and disorientation that comes when the life you were building suddenly isn’t the life you have anymore.
I won’t tell you the pain isn’t real. It is. I still carry both of those moments. Not as open wounds but as scars that I know are there. There are days something surfaces and I’m briefly back in that first conversation, or back in the room where we decided to close the doors for the last time. The emotions don’t fully leave. They just change shape.
But here’s what I see when I hold up a mirror to those moments now.
I see thirteen years at a church I love, with people I’ve walked through baptisms and funerals and every hard season in between. I see a marriage that has been tested and held. I see a voice I didn’t have before. I see the ability to stand in a room and say hard things with conviction and care. I see the book I’m writing, which only exists because of what those closed doors taught me. I see a version of myself that the sixth-grade kid with the dream could never have imagined. And that version of me is built entirely from the rubble of things that didn’t survive.
None of that exists without the wrecking ball conversation. None of it exists without the church plant closing. The dream had to die, for me both times, so something more durable could be forged in its place.
That’s not a comfortable thing to say to someone standing at a closed door. I know that. You’re not ready to hear about what’s on the other side yet. You’re still standing here, in this moment, with the grief of what just closed.
So I’ll just say this. The door closing is not the end of the story. It’s not even close to the end. What God does in the rubble of a dead dream is often the most significant work He ever does in a life.
I’ve seen it. Twice.
And I’m still here. Standing on the other side of both of them as proof that the closing wasn’t the point.
The building was.