One Great Reason to Bury Your Dreams

What a strange title for a post from someone known as a cheerleader for people’s dreams right? My question today is do you have faith strong enough to bury your biggest dream?

There certainly isn’t anything wrong with dreams or dreaming. I am as much of a dreamer as anyone I feel. It is a central voice within my career as a business/life coach, author, speaker and entrepreneur.

Like I said, I am all about people dreaming, believing in them and more importantly taking action on them. To testify to that claim, I’ll mention that I am the author of the new book called: Running Down Your Dreams.

This book will take readers on a 40-day journey in which they can fully assess and engage their dreams in life. The book engages the reader through a series of short stories in 10 themed areas about how dreams were realized through my life and the lives of those that God has put in my path. The power of personal testimonies allows readers to do an accurate self assessment and be inspired to put their dreams into action.

Keeping First Things First

However, my main purpose with today’s post is to talk about one making sure that first things are kept first. For many people (including myself), it is very easy for a dream that we have to become so important to us (be it being married, achieving financial success, having children, or reaching a career dream) that we allow it to take place of the pace car on the race track that is our lives. I am no race car buff, but I do know that the racers are supposed to follow the pace car, not be the pace car during that stage of the race.

Our big dream many times becomes very self-focused and self-consuming without even realizing it. We feel as if we will not be fully satisfied, content or happy in life until we achieve this dream. For many of us (even those who believe in God and consider themselves passionate about growing closer to Him throughout their lives) we still realize the reality that God is at best 2^nd place in our lives. We strip him of his rightful position of pace car as our lives continue and we race around the track of life. God desires and demands us to make him a priority in life. One of God’s greatest commandments is to love Him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, while loving your neighbor and enemies as you would love yourself. Simply put, God desires to be #1 in our lives. When He is, our lives are dramatically different. Many times it, all begins with surrendering one of your biggest dreams.

Surrendering Your Biggest Dreams

For me my biggest dream for much of my life has been to become happily married, and start a family. I will not get into all of my back-story in that regard, however I can just say that it has been something that way too many times in my life became a self-consuming pursuit and passion. One that became way too big in my life. It created a healthy imbalance at times. Not always, but when it did, it was never a good thing. I can look back on my life now, and realize that truth.

For quite some time, I knew I needed to surrender my need to be in control of achieving this dream. I needed to make my relationship with God first in my life. Many that might have known me well might have already thought that was the case. Perhaps it was some days, but it wasn’t consistent for sure. I realized by surrendering my timelines, and achievement of this dream to God, that I was exhibiting a greater measure of faith through surrendering the outcome of the dream to God’s more than capable hands. In doing so, I pray that God will help me to continue to grow as a man, so I can become more in line with His character which was best demonstrated through the life of Jesus Christ. He knows my dreams better than I do anyway. This decision also now allows me to focus on loving people as passionately as I can each day. It doesn’t mean that I have sworn off dating or the opposite sex. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have the same dream of marriage. It doesn’t mean I am waiting for the FedEx girl to ring the door bell. It simply means that I am more passionate about keeping my priorities right. I do that now by trusting that God will lead and guide me in the best path of life that I could live, no matter what that does or doesn’t mean for me in regards to achieving my dream of marriage. So, for me I realized after hearing the same voice from many people I respected, that it was time to burying my dream that was led by a desire to control the outcome and create a memorial for it (literally). In burying it, I relinquished control to God, and made a commitment to let Him fulfill and/or re-write that dream as He saw fit.

Ways to Create a Memorial for Your Dreams

After hearing from several well knows spiritual leaders and speakers all within a six weeks span, I felt affirmed and confident that this action was genuine prompting from God’s Holy Spirit. They all used different language, but all three of them talked about the concept of reflecting on the icons, milestones or hallmarks of God’s faithfulness in my life (specific dates or time periods that you will never forget), and creating some tangible ways like creating a special journal that you always keep for this sole reason. One you use to assess, record and meditate upon such things. By doing so, you can focus on what God has done in your life, rather than what you desire for Him to do in your life that has not yet been fulfilled. It becomes a place to go to when you felt empty, lost and let down. It also serves as a reality check of who God is, and what He has already done and continues to do in your life. I created one just like this recently. It would become a game changer in regards to my perspective, and would lift my head out of the deep, hazy fog that it seemed trapped in over those weeks that I was listening to the speakers.

Everything came to a head one day at the Sandy Cove Retreat Center after listening to one of the speakers again. I walk into their prayer room, and sit down unknowingly in front of their journal book called a “Book of Remembrance”. It was setup to literally remember of God’s faithfulness in our lives, and to serve to be a place to leave things behind (i.e. dreams that needed to be buried in surrender to God). That day, I reflected on Holy Scriptures like James Chapter 4 which talks about drawing closer to God. It is a great place to read to better understand that if we draw nearer to God with our dreams in life and keep first things first, then we can clearly draw closer to God. It starts with our intentions and motives behind our dreams. It has everything to do with how we view God, and how important is He is in our lives. I firmly believe our relationship with Him should always be bigger than any dream we have.

Are you willing to surrender your biggest/most passionate dreams to God? Are you truly willing to allow God to be the architect of your dreams even if He has different or better ones than the biggest one you have today? Meaning are you willing to completely entrust your dream (and it happening or maybe not ever happening) into God’s hands? If you are, He will change your outlook, and bring His best dreams for your life to the foreground as you draw nearer to Him and they might just exceed the biggest dream in your heart today!

So what are your answers to these questions posed here? I’d love to hear them. Feel free to contact me or call me at 717-615-2274 and share them with me…

God Bless,

Joe

* feel free to contact me personally with any questions or comments.