So, wow, this is my first post in a very long time!
I can't believe how in life things change and things that once were constant are no longer. 
As a little girl looking into the future I never saw what is now my life unfolding in front of me. As I sit and struggle with this, I am prone to wondering if my life now is better or worse than the one that I had envisioned. 
I come to the conclusion that I don't know. My life is not over, judging it would be like judging a book before the last page and yet, if my life doesn't look like the one that I wanted when I was younger then how is it going to be anything like the one that I envisioned. 
Things are different. Friends are gone, family is gone, boys that I thought were meant for me ended up with girls that I never dreamed of. I struggle daily with the effects left from my father's stroke and always wonder at the possibility of how many milestones in my life will he see. There is an unclearness when it comes to where I will be in 5 years, 10 years and even 40.
On the other hand I have been given a new name, from the people in Uganda, that I have spent my life loving. I have seen a new society, killed cockroaches the size of my hands. I have looked at the deepest sunset as though I have fallen into a great abyss and into the hands of my beloved Father. I have felt the deepest passion and the hardest hearbreak. I have measured my own strength against my heros' and realized that I am made of the same vulnerable and impenetrable fabric. I have reached my hand out and felt the face of an invisible God.
I have to wonder where these all things that I dreamed of? Where these moments that my young mind could not grasp?
The future is fickle and an unkindly friend, so I conclude that my life is not made based on the merits of my dreams and hopes, but on the merit of grace recieved, freely, and the moments that you put yourself out there to be broken and vulnerable.
These are the things that true dreams are made of.
As for my life, is it better or worse that I had dreamed?? It is both. But there is a goodness in it that comes not from me, but from an everloving Father who I will meet face to face one day. So until then, my life is still being written. I am still a portrait that is being painted, I won't be able to judge it until my final day has come.