When I was a kid, people always told me that I could be anything that I wanted to be. Parents, teachers, mentors… They all told me that if I could dream it, I could do it. What they neglected to tell me was that not every dream of mine would come true.

See, there’s this established association between hard work and success. Everyone believes that if you work hard for what you want, you’ll receive it- every time. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t always the case. There is no correlative factor between hard work and success in your endeavors and I’m learning that the hard way.

Before you freak out, let me explain. I’m not telling you not to dream wildly, and I’m not telling you to put off pursuing your dreams. To be honest, I encourage people with wild dreams, and I’ll do everything to help someone reach their ambitions; but the cold hard fact of the matter is that sometimes, no matter how hard you work, you will never get there. You will stand at the brink of dreams, the cusp of victory, and never be able to savor it. Frankly, that’s not even the most disappointing of situations. Do you know what is? Fulfilling your dreams and realizing it wasn’t really what you wanted.

I’ve been in both circumstances, and believe me when I say that they both suck. However, I was being honest, it was the disappointment after my success that was most heart wrenching. I spent a really long time attempting to figure out why that was too. I spent months, years even, trying to understand why I reached my goals, only to be filled with a desire for something different—something more. It wasn’t until recently that the light bulb came on for me.

You see, the plans that we establish for ourselves as people are entirely futile. No matter how desperately we might want something, if it isn’t in God’s will for our lives it isn’t happening. No matter how desperately you and I might fight against God, He—the ruler and creator of this world—controls our fates. The reality of it all is that our fates were sealed before this world even took its first breath. Our passions, our sins, our schooling… It was already done to God. He’s seen all of our successes and our failures before we could even contemplate them. Thus it should serve as no surprise that we can’t outwit the man upstairs, even if we try (and I have given it my best effort, trust me). It wasn’t that I didn’t know about Jesus and his omnipotence. It was rather the opposite.

I grew up in a Christian school. In terms of being theologically well versed, I ranked pretty highly. My knowledge of God was vast, and I thought I understood everything just as well. Turns out I was wrong. There are issues in your life that you know the answer to, yet you refuse to accept that answer. You refute everything you know, simply because you think you could do it differently. If you’re determined enough, I know for a fact that God will let you give it a go. He’ll unbridle his hold on you and turn you out to run. Eventually, you’ll realize a mistake was made. For me, it happened years after the story began. The realization that I was making a mistake in pursuing my dreams happened after I had achieved a relative amount of success. For me, my dream was rodeo.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of sending a 1,200 pound animal down an alleyway to turn three barrels in the fastest time you can manage. From your seat, you can literally feel the energy and anticipation of the mount beneath you radiate upward. Like you, they are filled with a desire to go fast. In a good barrel horse’s mind, their job is their reward. For a good jockey, their job is their addiction. That’s what barrel horses became for me, an addiction. The money I accumulated in winnings was nice, but there really wasn’t anything compared to the feeling you’d get from hearing crowds screaming for you and your horse, not for me anyways. The louder the crowds screamed, the harder my horse ran, and the deeper I was pulled into the drug they call rodeo.

There was one slight problem with this: my high school career was drawing to a close. The time I had left at home was dwindling rapidly, and I had yet to see the signs. By the time I was 15, I was a junior in high school and a sophomore in college (dual enrollment is a blessing). I was accumulating credit hours at a rapid pace, and still hitting every barrel race and rodeo I could manage. It was then that I experienced my first “no” from God. When I say no, I don’t mean the, “hey kid, don’t do that” kind of no either. Overnight, God took the career that I had spent years developing. He took my rig, He took my horses, but He forgot to take my passion. You want to talk about some anger? Man, I was full of it.

Despite the signs, I didn’t roll over in defeat. I picked up the pieces of my career and went out to start again. The tide never turned in my favor. Over the course of a year, I hit roadblock after roadblock, yet I trudged on. It wasn’t until January that I finally collapsed. Exhausted from my efforts, I was hopeless and threw myself into my schoolwork. God, laughing at my late arrival, opened every door for me to graduate early and go off to college. That’s right, I moved 300 miles from home to a large university at 16 years old. Even at college, I never stopped wanting to pursue my passion. That being said, it was there that I realized God was purposefully blocking me. God was intentionally stopping me from pursuing my dreams; He was telling me no. The realization hit me in the face like a ton of bricks. I was distraught, despondent even. How could God give me such a passion for something and then not let me have it? How could He tell me no? Even though I haven’t yet synthesized why God gave me the passion, I have synthesized why He took my ability to pursue it.

Like I said earlier, rodeo was my addiction. It was my entire life, my entire focus. Had God allowed me to continue to rodeo, my college education could have (and would have) been at stake. My deep desire to be a veterinarian would have been compromised all for a few seconds in a pen and a few hundred dollars to win. I would have given up everything in order to rodeo; frankly, I still would. That’s the whole reason why God took it from me. That’s the sum of why He told me no. It took me over a year to understand this, and even though I understand, I still long for it some days. I still wish desperately that I could be loading up and heading out with my best friends. The reality is that I can’t though.

I don’t know how long I will be denied my dreams, or if I’ll ever have the opportunity to pursue them again. What I do know is that if I am not allowed to rodeo, God will replace my passion for it with a passion for something else. Even though it seems terrible that He would take something from you, God is not cruel. Matter of fact, He is the exact opposite. God only wants to absolute best for you, and sometimes that means He has to destroy good things so that great things might fall into place. Sometimes, God must be harsh, so that the mercy in the end is extra sweet. He is a loving, merciful God. He is the ultimate healer and provider.

I’m telling you all of this in hopes of saving you a little bit of heartache. I know that my situation tore me to shreds, and like I said, some days it still hurts. I want you to be able to understand and recognize when God is telling you no, however. I can’t ultimately tell you how to deal with that “no,” but I sincerely hope that I can provide insight to you with my experience. Trust me, I’ve bumped my head enough times to know a few things.

I promise y’all, God knows what’s up. As bad as it might get, as scared and mad as you might be, the best is yet to come.