I’ve been talking to Jesus a lot lately about my calling. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in doing “good works” and completely miss the mark on why I was even created. With each new group of friends God brings along, I find myself looking around and asking Jesus, “Why am I here?”. Sometimes it can seem as if every base is covered and I don’t “feel like” I have anything to offer but I know that simply isn’t true. No place God leads me is full with everything it needs to thrive and prosper, otherwise He wouldn’t bring me there. They need me as much as I might need them, and we all need people who champion our calling.
“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago.” Eph 2:10
I, you, everyone is a masterpiece created by God in His image. I was listening to Dutch Sheets this morning reading from one of his books, he was talking about dreaming with Jesus. Why dream if I don’t have a purpose? I dream because God dreams. I dream because He has a dream He planted in my heart for the Kingdom and He wants me to discover it with Him. What I have found in my life is that I have let a lot of people attempt to “help me” with a lot of advice without any questions, sadly it has harmed me. They didn’t mean to harm me, they just spoke without asking Jesus what their role was in my dream. And, I have done that to others. Sometimes out of excitement, sometimes out of experience, and sometimes because I thought I knew better. I don’t want to do that to others anymore, I want to ask Jesus why I am there and what He wants me to do in their dream since He obviously brought me to it. That seems like a much better way to work for the Kingdom.
Dreaming, and then following the steps to achieve dreams, can get hindered by comparison. WHen I look at other people and see their public persona appearing as if they have it all together, I can get lost in who I am not today. THrough many friendships and conversations, I am discovering none of us have it all together. Many of us are giving it our best effort, but wounds, traumas, and life experience has beaten us down so low that it becomes difficult to reemerge our dreams, especially the older we get. And, since we don’t feel “really good” as God called His creation of mankind in Genesis (Gen 1:31), we listen to the voices in our heads that say we are not enough. We ARE enough. The Bible says that we are enough! We were made to dream with God, but doing that takes guts, hope, and so much faith. We have to continue believing in who we were made to be even when we are walking in the “valley of the shadow of death”. God wants us to dream with Him. He wants to reveal to us all that He created us for, not just for the here and now we live in, but for all eternity. The closer we draw to Him, the more we dream with Him, the stronger we become as the masterpiece He created us to be. We don’t have to fight for our placement in someone else’s dreams, we have our own dream planted in us.
It can be hard to continue in the fight for that dream God placed in your heart, I know it has been one for me. The enemy has hit every single area of my life with plans for evil. Both my, and doc’s, health have been challenged which automatically leads to financial challenges because our body wont cooperate with our minds. We have been hit relationally within our families, and within the body of the Church. We have been hit career wise multiple times. And the stress and trauma from all of that can lead to despair and dreaming begins to erode. Bad habits form and faith wanes, we feel defeated and dreaming becomes the furthest thing from our minds. But for the cry within us for the Kingdom to be here, now, and life as God intended it to start it might be simply impossible to dream again. My heart reaches out to Him who first loved me and says to Him, “Help me dream again Father, Your will be done.”
“We love Him, because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19
As Beauty Unfolds... 