It sucks when the position you want is held beyond reach.
It really sucks when you know that you will eventually have that position.
Everyone has been in this place in one way or another. We sit on the JV team, just waiting for someone on Varsity to graduate, or for someone to be injured so you can sub in. We work on a staff with the managerial position is just out of reach, and we work extra long exhausting hours on the line in hopes of a better position after just a couple more months.
Just a little longer.
Just a little longer and we will be where we want to be.
For the past two years I have been sitting on an experiment. It was an experiment that seemed entirely straightforward. Our lab proposes that cholesterol is delivered through the cell in lysosome membrane tubules. It only made sense to me that if there wasn’t any cholesterol around that these tubules would not be in the cell, and if you added cholesterol to the cells that the tubules would come back.
It seemed like the perfect project for a first year to try.
But my advisor just kept telling me to wait.
Frustrated, I went on to do the other projects that we needed to complete for the big paper. It was not like any of these projects were easier than the one I proposed. Working in mice is challenging, and you don’t get a re-do once you sacrifice them. Sectioning cerebellums from these mice is challenging, and you have to get it just right to observe what you need. Staining has numerous steps that are easy to mess up.
It made absolutely no sense for me, the first year with no background in anatomy, to be doing this work.
And yet that was the position I was stuck in.
Sometimes the position we are given does not make much sense. We feel underprepared, or unmotivated, or just plain uncomfortable. Those who have gone before us will say that it is “all part of the process” and then they will say to “trust the process.” Yet there were are, in the most unlikely set of scenarios, dreaming of better days.
Day dreaming does not help you in the moment though.
I wrote previously about what to do in the waiting period. When we are waiting, we should be present and acknowledge all of the wonderful aspects of the lives we are living. After all, there has to be a reason we are in the place we’re in. Nothing is without meaning.
But I missed a very important point.
You have to keep dreaming.
Our dreams reflect our deepest desires. These desires are a beautiful gift from the God who loved us first. They remind us of who we are meant to be, and they inform our decisions. If we want to be a performer, then we seek out shows to play in. If we want to be a professor, then we engage in research. Dreams are not a bad thing, and we should never give up on them.
After all, Saint Joseph came back to Mary because of a dream.
So then comes the challenge. We have to be willing to see the dream within the nightmare. Maybe we are not doing the work we want to be doing, but that job can share aspects of our dream job that we can hone in on. Maybe we are dealing with a difficult move, but maybe that new home will have little pieces of our past life that we can hold fast to.
To see dreams in a nightmare requires us to be present in the moment.
And it also requires us to take every opportunity to prepare for our dreams.
Over the past two years, I had to learn where my dream fit in to the nightmare of mouse work. I knew that my mice could not metabolize cholesterol. Their livers degenerate at a rapid rate. at a In order to inform myself about this defect, I pulled out all of the classical literature that I could. I read from Nobel Prize papers, and I read from current research, and I did my very best to understand the system.
But there was a huge gap in the literature.
The Nobelaureates who discovered statins, the most prescribed drug in the United States, did not understand why cells could sense cholesterol’s presence in two hours’ time. They said so explicitly on their seminal work that was the cover of Cell on the day of my birth.
My heart started to race.
Everything I had been working on made it apparent to me that our hypothesis would fit this Nobel Prize winning model. If I did not do all of my reading to understand my mouse project, I would never have seen this connection.
You could imagine my excitement when my advisor gave me the go-ahead for the project I had been anticipating for two years.
By allowing a dream to persist in a nightmare, we prepare ourselves for the future. Like I said, our dreams inform our decisions, and if we are willing to hold on to hope, then we will make the decisions necessary to make our dreams come true. It doesn’t matter where we learn how to live out our dreams. All that matters is that we live our best lives and never give up hope.
“Not only that, but we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
~Romans 5:3-5
God gave us dreams to remind us of our Heavenly home. He knows what will make us truly happy, and He gives us little dreams to help us become the men and women we were made to be. We are all made to be happy.
“DR VAUGHAN!” I screamed and ran out of the microscopy room in to my advisor’s office. Dr. Vaughan looked up at me with a clearly concerned face. It was not often that I sprinted in to his office.
“It worked!” I cheered, but a little more quietly.
My advisor then asked me to explain what I saw. As I attempted to calm myself down, I described what I saw. I told him that I recreated the Nobel Prize paper’s conditions, and I told him how I was directly testing my hypothesis. I told him every single stage as if he had never heard it before. Then, after going through all of the preparatory steps, I looked at him and described the lysosome membrane tubules responding to the cholesterol.
In a state of near disbelief, my advisor chuckled.
No one had expected this to work.
But I did.
I do not believe that this moment would have worked out the way it did had I not been forced to wait. In the waiting period, I had to let my dream develop. I prepared myself for the life I wanted to live, even if it was just a new experimental design. Each day I worked on the mouse, I grew in confidence, and it was that confidence that allowed me to make such a huge claim for my dream experiment.
This wait is what made the moment all the more special.
Perhaps that is why patience is a virtue; it reminds us of the inherent value of the future.
“The waiting is the whole point” ~Kelly Courington
There is a dream that I still am holding on to in my heart. I know that there are wonderful things to come, but maybe I just need a little more time to prepare myself for them. There are probably some conditions that I have not properly controlled for, or maybe I do not know the right background information.
God gave me this dream, and I will not give up hope.
I will continue to prepare myself for what is to come, even if it hurts. My heart will be broken time and time again. My nightmare situations with terrible experiments and people will try to knock me down, as they have been for far too long. Still, I will not give up until this little dream, a gift from God, is in my life at last.
“So, whatever happens I will not be afraid
Cause You are closer than this breath that I take
You calm the storm when I hear You call my name
I still believe that one day I'll see Your face”
~I Have This Hope, Tenth Avenue North
Do not give up hope Dear Reader.
No matter where you are, no matter whom you are with, no matter what you are doing, there is hope for a brighter future. No moment is perfect, but they can be perfected more and more each day. Your dreams are valid, special, and loved by the God who gave them to you.
I believe in your dreams Dear Reader.
And you should too.
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