Guest Post: Broken Dreams

It’s September 2008.  The wooden gazebo offers shade from the Arizonan sun, already strong at ten in the morning.  My therapist and I look out over the dusty ranch towards an irrigated field where horses graze, tails flicking. 

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he says, slowly, his hand on his Bible, “and I want to share a verse I think is meant for you today.”

I nod my face downwards and gaze at my bare toes.

“It’s Psalm 37:4. Do you know what it says? – ‘Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.’” 

I look up at him, briefly. “I don’t know what my heart desires.” 

“What about the most basic of desires…that this darkness would lift?”

“I don’t want it to lift.”

“I’ve known a lot of people with darkness like yours, but I don’t think I’ve heard any of them say that they don’t want rid of it. And yet I know you and I believe you. You can’t conceive of life without this darkness, and you would rather just have an ending?”

I suck in my cheeks. “Mmm-hmm.”

His eyes glisten a little and he exhales through his mouth. “That’s really sad, Sharon.  Is it okay if I pray for you – that you will know what it is your heart desires?”

I shrug my shoulders.  “I guess.”

A Young Mum and a Doctor

I hadn’t always felt this way, of course.  In my teenage years I dreamed more than anything else of getting married and having a big family in my twenties.  Vocationally, my dreams were vaguer – until I arrived at medical school and discovered in the course of my first semester that I wanted more than anything to be a doctor.  I loved the buzz of the hospital and thought I might be a paediatrician or an orthopaedic surgeon, but a fabulous placement in family practice during my fourth year changed all that.  I wanted to have long term relationships with my patients.  I was destined to be a GP.

A Devastating Diagnosis

That was before mental illness hit.  In 2007, as a final year student, I was admitted involuntarily to a psychiatric unit with major depression, a diagnosis later adjusted to schizoaffective disorder.  I graduated but was deemed unfit to practise.  My dream – then the deepest desire of my heart, or so I thought – had been shattered.

After attempts at treatment failed in the UK, I came to be at that Wickenburg ranch, sitting in an outdoor therapy session, devoid of dreams, devoid of desires, hopes dashed, desolate.  I truly knew what it meant for darkness to be my closest friend (Psalm 88:18).

But – a whole, painful decade later – my therapist’s prayer was answered.

The Years of the Locusts

I spent years in brokenness, floored by episodes of depression, terrified by episodes of psychosis, embarrassed by episodes of mania, often languishing in hospital for long periods of time.  But throughout, there were small glimmers of hope – the hope that comes from relationship with a God who once said; “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” (Joel 2:25) In those small moments of relief, I took delight in my Heavenly Father.

A Forgotten Dream; a Call from God

In time, a desire awakened within me.  I wasn’t ‘better’ but I had begun to find my voice through writing, and I wanted to give a voice to others like me with severe psychotic illnesses, bringing them hope, and helping to equip Christians walking alongside them.  In 2018, a forgotten dream came true, when I was offered a contract with IVP to write Wrestling With My Thoughts.

I say forgotten dream, because long before those teen years when family was all I wanted, and before I was grabbed by the potential of a career in medicine, I longed to write.  My Primary 2 teacher, impressed by my stapled-together storybooks, told my mother I should be an author; even as a medical student my biggest accolades were for journal articles I had penned in my spare time.

I had become not just a writer, but a ‘doctor-writer’: my personal story of living as a Christian with severe mental illness was enhanced by boxes explaining terms and treatments.  I could write in words which the lay person could understand but with the authority of a doctor.  Those years which the locusts had eaten were finally redeemed!

God’s Dreams are the Best Dreams

And not only did I become a doctor-writer, but during those dark days, the greatest glimmer of hope had been God’s provision for me in the form of Rob, who looked beyond my illness to see a fellow child of God.  We were married in 2015 and, since the publication of Wrestling With My Thoughts and the measure of recovery which has followed, I have finally become a mum to a beautiful son.

I wanted a great big family in my twenties.  I wanted to be a high-flying medic.  But God’s dreams are the best dreams.  He revealed to me that my heart’s deepest desires were to love and to be loved and to share his goodness to me with others.  Today, I am doing just that as a doctor-writer, and I have been placed within a perfect little family (Psalm 68:6).

Broken Dreams - a Common Reality, but there is Hope!

Perhaps you are living with broken dreams – with unwanted singleness, infertility, a failed business, the frustrations of physical illness or disability… and you feel as lost as I did.  It’s horrible, isn’t it?  But my story is evidence that God is ever-present in those years of despair.  Ultimately, he showed me the true desires which he had birthed within me, but I had to surrender my broken dreams and take delight in him first.  Even then, it took time before God revealed what he had for me.

In 2008, my dreams had been shattered; in 2021, the desires of my heart are being fulfilled.  So don’t give up.  Take delight in the Lord, be patient, be gentle with yourself, and I pray that he will align your heart with His and open your eyes to His dreams for you too.