God > Your Wildest Dreams

On Monday, I had the opportunity to spend a large chunk of time alone in the car with my oldest daughter after a dentist appointment. During this time, she told me all about a friend of hers from school that is currently obsessing about the classes she’ll take in college (mind you, these girls are winding down their seventh grade school year). This friend wants to be a lawyer/neuroscientist so that she can have a lot of money and power in order to address and dismantle a particular hot-button issue.

Hey, it’s good to have dreams. But my daughter and I were both a little overwhelmed by her friend’s particular dream. Nonetheless, it served as a great launching point to revisit the message we’d heard the day before: God > Your Wildest Dreams.

A pang of wistfulness jabs at my heart every time I hear a message on “dreams.” I wouldn’t categorize myself as a dreamer – and that bums me out. Whenever, I sit with a dreamer (which is pretty much every night because I’m married to one) and hear the passion in their voice as they talk about “all the things,” I’m amazed. And exhausted. And frustrated.

Exhausted because “all the things” will take so much time and effort to do! Frustrated because I just can’t make myself think and dream like that! It’s been a point of defeat for the bulk of my adult journey.

Here’s the thing: while I’m not much of a dreamer, I am an excellent planner. Tell me your dream and I will generate lists, spreadsheets, timelines, and files – and then compile it all nicely into a binder. However, I will express to you how many rules have been broken, which timeframes are ridiculous, how costs are exorbitant, and that manpower is non-existent. And I’m pretty sure that’s where my exhaustion comes in.

And yet, Sunday’s message about dreams didn’t bum me out. I came away extremely encouraged and excited because for the first time the idea of “dreams” didn’t feel exhausting and overwhelming. My desperate striving and planning can sit in the passenger seat while “trust” drives the car.

Being a dreamer is possible if I trust God. Because NEWSFLASH: I don’t have to make it all happen! The key is trust. Trusting Him is greater than any dream I could imagine – or dash, for that matter.

Amy presented four key points of trust (for more on this, I would highly recommend listening to the podcast if you missed it):

• Trust God with your dream
• Trust Him with your treasure
• Trust His promptings
• Trust Him with your balance

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Romans 12:1-2 from The Message encapsulates this so much better than anything I could write. So I’ll leave you with this, and I hope that it’s as liberating for you as it was for me:

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life – and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Romans 12:1-2 (The Message)

Written by: Jaime Hlavin