Within each of us lies an influence that, for the most part, goes unused and even unrecognized. Deep inside of each of us lies the ability to dream. This faculty is significant, even though it is not embraced by many. This is the part of us that wonders what could be. It is the genesis of everything of deep meaning that we accomplish in life. Those who embrace this faculty will achieve things others don’t even dare imagine. Those who neglect or ignore it will endure relentless torment from its nagging whispers about what could have been.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to dare to desire amazing things. Faith is a willingness to believe there is something better available, even if you already have something good.
You don’t realize it, but you are limiting what God can do through what you are willing to desire. You have to get to the point where you can boldly believe in a God of miracles—a God who does impossible things all the time. “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)
There is a path to every outcome, but whether we choose to seek, find, and follow that path is another question altogether. Faith is what makes one seek what no one else is willing to seek, find what no one else has found, and do what no one else is willing to do. All of this starts with daring to desire what no one else desires, then seeking the Lord with unrelenting open-mindedness so that he can reveal to you the path that will yield the outcome you seek.
Far too many of us significantly limit our faculty to dream by filtering out any potential outcomes that are not tied to what we experience in the physical world. Unlike our physical senses, our desires need not be dampened in any way by what we see before us. The spirit is an infinite, unquenchable channel. To obtain all that God would have us obtain, we must avoid imposing any limits to his infinity.
It seems that children most naturally embrace unbounded dreams. For them, everything is so new and untested that it takes far less to differentiate the fanciful from the practical than it does with adults. Somewhere along the line, children learn to limit themselves to what has already been done and to what they see manifested in the lives of those around them.
You have to relearn to dream without tethering yourself to your present circumstances. Faith requires looking and thinking beyond present bounds. Where you are right now is completely irrelevant to what you can obtain. Where you are right now only matters in the reason and action steps of the faith cycle. Don’t make the mistake of limiting your desires. Desire is about really being honest about what you want, not about finding out what it will take to get it or whether you are willing to do it.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to set aside the limits you place on yourself. Your accomplishments with God’s strength will surpass the many limitations you have. Solomon was not born the wisest man in the world. God brought him up to his wise stature. You will likewise have to rise beyond what you think are your limits. You will have to encounter and overcome things that you think are beyond you.
While we are limited in our physical resources, there is absolutely no limit to the ideas you can consider, and those ideas can be engineered to work within the constraints of the physical world to generate what was previously considered impossible—or not even considered at all.
Perhaps part of our discouragement comes from the realization that we, personally, are unwilling to do what it would take to have an unusually abundant life. Most of us are far less foolish than we act, and many will quickly realize that desires are attached to action. Having an ample list of things that they are not willing to do, many will quickly abort any desire that touches on this list in the earliest stages of ideation, usually without conscious thought. Unfortunately, the masses that so smoothly abort desires seem never to develop as smooth a satisfaction with the outcomes they consistently choose. Having turned away from something better due to an unwillingness to do what it would take to obtain it, they still writhe and complain about what they opted for instead, as if these things are not completely coupled.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to courageously face bitter disappointment. Perhaps part of the reason for the gradual dampening of the magnitude of our dreams is the pain that comes from the realization that things and people are not what they seemed. Children 26
begin life with a default willingness to trust. They have high hopes of people and outcomes. Their implicit trust attenuates over time through repeated disappointments. Eventually, their trust becomes something that must be won, not something that is automatically bestowed.
You can’t desire what your heart is not set on, and given the likelihood of your desire being based on incomplete understanding, you are bound to have your heart break when God shows you the insufficiency of the thing you thought would fulfill your desire. The more important and beneficial the subject of your desire, the more you can count on heartbreak. The heartbreak is unavoidable, because it is the only way you can be led on closer and closer to the thing you actually seek. The more important what you seek, the more times and more deeply your heart will break. Playing it safe will guarantee you never obtain what you seek. No matter how much you lie to yourself about settling for something less, the day will come when you are filled with regret and remorse for having done so. If you wait until it is too late to do something about it, that regret will be yours eternally.
For some, relentless disappointment of unmet expectations, crashing down incessantly like waves on a shore, coalesces in the realization that they possess an outsized longing that nothing in this world seems to be able to satisfy. Those coming to this realization possess an enormous gift. They alone will ever marshal the requisite desire to truly seek the Lord with all their heart, might, mind, and strength. It is Christ alone that is the only hope they have of ever satisfying the longing within. Unfortunately, though few ever get to this point, most of those who do will run from this realization by any means possible, too scared of what it means: that normality truly has nothing to offer, that they will never possess the vacuous happiness of the damned, that it is as tenuous and fleeting as they supposed, and that the relationships that will actually satisfy them are exceedingly few and will only be found through extreme and socially-rejected measures.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to courageously and boldly do what is reasonable, even when it is unpopular, difficult, or unlikely. When you have faith, you will find yourself constantly doing things others dismiss as impossible. As you look back on a life of faith, you will find that nearly everything of value was an impossibly long shot. Still, there is a significant difference between actions of faith and unwise risk. Faith is always justified. Faith is not about acting without reason. Faith requires reasons. The question is do the reasons justify the action? The lack of bold moves in the life of the faithless is not about a lack of reasons to make bold moves, but rather a lack of honesty in assessing the value of potential outcomes and incorrectly confusing constancy or normality for lack of risk. For example, a mid-career change might be considered a leap of faith for those who value constancy, but only because they are incorrectly valuing constancy compared to the outcomes possible in a career move.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to face persecution from others. As a person exercises the needed courage to embrace and develop their dreams, they will find themselves surrounded by greater and greater resistance and persecution from others. The more a person dreams, the more they will find that others do not. Dreamers find themselves bombarded by constant evidences that other people do not think or feel the way they do. They learn quickly—usually around the age of puberty—that the easiest way to deal with their dreams is to shut them down in any way possible. But dreams do not die an easy death. No matter how much drugs, alcohol, travel, shallow relationships, sex, or other means are used to squash them, their roots will endure and issue a constant cry of what might have been.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you will have to subject yourself to continual change. Until you are like him, he has more to change in you. If your desires, reasons, and actions remain unchanged, your outcomes will also remain unchanged. Following “dead works” will never yield the same living, changing, growing, custom, interactive guidance as a real relationship with God will.
In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to set aside your preconceived notions about the path to become all you can be. Joseph, son of Jacob, was not born as the second most powerful man in the known world. God brought him up to that outcome through slavery, false imprisonment, and abject abandonment from all who should have cared about him. Do you have reason to believe your path will be any less surprising?
In order to become all God intends you to be, you have to submit to any timetable he may have. Abraham’s path towards a righteous son—which was the consuming desire of his heart—lay in waiting until miraculous old age to see it fulfilled.
Dreams, unattempted, will never fully die. They accumulate, and each one will relentlessly haunt the person for the duration of and even beyond this life. A significant portion of the torment of hell is an everlasting awareness of all the good outcomes that you had the means to bring about for yourself and others, but chose not to.
Dare to dream! Dare to set the ordinary life aside. Dare to listen to the sudden strokes of ideas that come to your mind. Dare to believe there is a path to anything you can imagine. Dare to be honest about the lackluster outcomes of what everyone else does. Dare to recognize faulty solutions to problems in spite of the fact that everyone else embraces them. Dare to reflect on, study, and critically think about life.