When your memories are greater than your dreams, you’ve already begun to die. – Eugene May
A mindset doesn’t happen accidentally. It takes a conscious effort to view today as temporal, and stay hopeful for tomorrow.
The present can be overwhelming, a metaphorical season of drought, harsh winter, or severe flooding. You might find yourself hampered by frustrating or debilitating conditions.
Or, maybe you were overcome by your yesterdays. Cumulative trauma, failures, tragedies, or injustices had an affect on your outlook. Bad events outnumbered the good, enough to induce an expectation of more bad ahead. Sometime during all that hardship, your dreams were buried.
It’s understandable that people surrender dreams and default to memories to fill the void. There are few things more excruciating than rallying to try again, to hope again, to end the vicious cycle, only to be met with more disappointment. When dreams cause pain, memories offer solace.
But, When your memories are greater than your dreams, you’ve already begun to die.
The American pioneers plowed land for a purpose: for food, for survival. It was hard work to break the sod, plant a crop, and keep the plot from reverting to prairie. As long as they worked the land, they improved their odds for an ample harvest. If they quit, the surrounding indigenous plants encroached until the farmed plot succumbed.
It takes work to maintain a healthy mindset, too. If you don’t keep your dreams and hopes for a good future alive, your mind can be overtaken by your past. Instead of forging the best possible future, you can cause your own stagnancy. Instead of being a plowed field able to support a healthy crop, yours can revert to weeds.
Genesis 8:22 (ESV) “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
Keep expecting, so when your drought, flooding, or winter ends — as they always do — your sod is already broken, inertia is overcome, and your momentum is forward.
Keep expecting, so when your spring arrives, you are primed and ready to fully engage in it.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.
(Song of Songs, 2:11-13, NIV)
Cindi Gale 
I find this encouragement especially necessary as messages of expected inertia with aging abound. It takes mental and emotional fortitude to keep ploughing. But if anyone has had proof through the years that spring does come, it is the more mature of years. The most mature of years press into all that has been written for us to be and to accomplish.
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Thank you for your comment.
I’d call those incorrect messages (especially widely accepted ones from the majority) persistent and aggressive invaders.
It’s not easy to stand alone against a crowd, but when the soil and seeds are good and of God, it begs for a determined stance.
It’s a divine call of duty.
If every farmer of divinely-planted crops allowed their fields to be overtaken, not only the annual crop, but the seeds for future years’ crops won’t exist.
Already, it’s possible that we have become a remnant, as in biblical days.
It’s a test of commitment to God:
Be accepted by people or approved of by him?
Adopt others’ thinking or trust your “calling” to do what he alone asks?
Resort to a preferred theology or be willing to follow into the unknown?
Run to the safety of a selected tribe or summon the courage to work alone alongside only him, if that’s what he requires?
Crops yield seeds which yield crops which yield seeds … whether good seeds or bad. So …
Who will farm the pure seeds of God?
Who will harvest his pure crops and collect the seeds of that crop to plant next year? And the next year? …
What exactly are we planting on Earth today?
Where are the pure crops? Where are the pure farmers?
Is anyone doing it his way, day by day, with his unadulterated direction, or has everyone morphed to be accepted by people?
If a person doesn’t commit to keeping hope and a good future alive, outside forces will certainly claim their personal life and future instead.
Outside forces will certainly claim future generations’ lives and futures as well. There will be no seeds to continue God’s crops on Earth.
Keep on ploughing, weeding, watering, fertilizing, guarding … so that a harvest is possible in our lifetimes, and in the lives of future generations.
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