Dolly Parton

There have been so so many tributes to and about Dolly Parton over the last few days. Definitely one amazing woman who saw her gifts and talents as a way of blessing others. But out of all the tributes this one is my favourite, which can be found on I didn’t have my glasses on “I wake up with new dreams every day”

“Now the night I graduated from Sevier County High School, back in 1964, we were all asked to stand up and talk about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. And everybody had a different story. And when it came my time I stood right up there. I said I’m going to Nashville and I’m going to be a star. Well the whole place laughed out loud. And I was so embarrassed, cause I thought, ‘How odd. Why is everybody laughing? ‘Cause that is what I’m going to do.’ But as bad as I felt at that moment and as embarrassed as I was, it did not shake me from my dreams. So I guess I showed them, huh?”

– From her 2009 University of Tennessee, Knoxville commencement speech

The reason this stood out to me was because I wondered how many of us got knocked off our dreams because one person said “really?” to us when we said what we wanted to do when we were sixteen. Not a whole place laughing out loud but just that one person. Sometimes it only takes the one key person.

Or how many of us would have chased out dreams but with a f**k you attitude, being smug and saying “see look what I’ve done”, would have kept all that we made to ourselves, or kept making sure those who laughed at us knew we had made it big?

I think of all those people who have “chased a dream and made it” and rarely do we see one so willing to give it all away. I found a lovely story [which I’ve now lost] of Dolly having a jamming session in a bar in Ireland, no pretentions, no big deal.

I often wonder who we can show the world what Jesus is like, and what changes following him makes to us. Well I wonder if maybe this amazing lady is who we should look to. She took insults from teenagehood, then more because of her body shape, and many other things, but she never threw an insult back. She made loads of money and gave so much away. She still had her nice house and that but there are thousands of children who received over a thousand books from her, who maybe wouldn’t have had a parent read to them without Dolly’s reading scheme.

She appears to not have let what happened around her define her; not insults, not her talent, not her body shape, not her background. All these things are involved in shaping how she turned out and why she did the things she did but, from what I can see, they never defined her.

From what I have read Dolly Parton knew who she was in God, knew she was unconditionally love, and allowed her gifts, talents and giving away, flow from that place.

Could I do that? Could you do that?