When it was completed sometime after 1893, Rosehaugh House in Avoch, Scotland, was a mansion built to glory. Hundreds of people were employed and provided with the best and highest quality materials to complete the three-story, 60-room mansion with 365 windows, marble floors, Persian rug carpeted walls, painted ceilings, carved wood, and a car-sized fireplace in the billiard room.

The fabulous mansion was demolished in 1959.

Broken dreams. It seems unbelievable that such a rich, historic, and glorious mansion could be razed. The foundation, steps, overgrown gardens and out buildings are all that remain of one man’s dream to build the most splendid mansion in the world. What went wrong?

Death went wrong. Rosehaugh was already a magnificent home when James Fletcher died in 1885. Son James Douglas Fletcher hired famed Scottish architect William Flockhart to take the mansion from splendor to unmatched glory. Then James Douglas Fletcher died. His widow sold the estate in 1953 – and by 1959 – James Douglas Fletcher’s dream mansion had been demolished.

People die. Dreams die. Sometimes we kill our own dreams by poisoning them with drugs, alcohol, gambling, or other risky and dangerous lifestyle choices. Sometimes they die of natural causes.

I am thankful that God has given me the blessing of leaving behind a shelf of dreams when I die: Christian mystery-romance-suspense books like Bridge to Nowhere, published by Sunpenny Publishing, and Love’s Beating Heart, Shadow Chase, Heart Shadows, Until the Shadows Flee and the soon-to-be-released Fear of Shadows. But the fact is, I will die. I will follow James Douglas Fletcher off the stage of life and slip into a shadowy memory.

Unlike Fletcher’s dream, my dream won’t break or die. My dream is eternal. It is simply to follow Jesus and live for Him. The Bible promises that whatever I do for Christ here on earth will follow me to Heaven. It will be stored and waiting for me in a treasure chest where no one else can steal it and where it will never rot, tear, tarnish or age. When I get to Heaven, I’ll be able to lay it at the feet of Jesus and hear Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Rosehaugh Estate is still a lovely place where dreams shimmer in the shade of ancient trees. The current owners are restoring the buildings that are left and many of them are rented out as holiday homes. It’s a lovely place to take dogs on a walk and capture something lovely and unique through the lens of a camera. But it is also a sorrowful, haunting place of broken dreams and trampled glory. I’m so thankful that my glory doesn’t rest in even the finest, most glorious mansion built by human hands – but rather in Heaven – created by the Eternal Hands of Jesus, the Creator of the universe.