Today marks the end of 2019 and this decade. It’s been an interesting journey and my conclusion at the end of this decade and year is that there will be no more goals.
A Big Dream!
A few years ago I had a BIG DREAM, a vision. In my journey as a home educator, I found a need and I wanted to meet it. I saw it as a ‘calling from God’. I began doing everything and anything to make it happen.
At first, it seemed everything was going wonderfully. Then I thought I had found a team that had ‘caught the vision’ and we were going to do great and mighty things for the Lord. I was literally consumed by it, my entire identity became caught up in it. God was blessing it in ways that I couldn’t believe.
The hurricane
Then a hurricane was heading our way both spiritually and in reality. The first cracks started showing the day I found myself in my bathroom sobbing uncontrollably. I was not able to breathe. So, I just cried out to God to make the noise stop! The pressure was out of control. I was out of control. The noise was out of control!
The hurricane knocked out our power, internet, and cell service for 9 days. The noise stopped. And it was so calm for the first time in a LONG, LONG time! No one could contact me, there were no questions about what to do, no complaints, no opinions. Just silence.
As the power was restored I resolved that the noise would not regain control. Then a week later the phone rang with one of those horrible phone calls you pray you never receive. News so devastating, your heart can’t even begin to process the depth of grief it is facing.
Two weeks later I found myself back in the middle of ‘my dream’ trying to keep going. Yet the world didn’t feel the same. People asked if I was mad at them about something, that I seemed distant. I feel a little sorry for myself, that instead of seeing the depth of the battle going on inside me they saw me pulling back. I was hiding in dark corners of my mind to avoid reality.
Home wanted!
The pressure mounted when finding a new home became a ‘to-do’ item that now had a deadline. It was a good thing but it meant more change. I wasn’t processing stress and change very well at this point.
Maybe if that hadn’t been happening I would have seen that ‘my dream’ was being hijacked. I hadn’t seen that the people that I thought had caught the vision had been quietly melting it down. They were trying to pour it into a different mold, their mold. But there was work to do and no time to think about anything. So I had just soldiered on.
We found the most perfect home, I call it my hug from God because it had little details that only He knew. The realtor had been given a very small want list to work with. It marked a new beginning. A fresh start after a very dark time in our lives.
Opening my eyes
I was finally brave enough to open my eyes when the dark clouds parted and I felt the sun on my face again. What I saw was a disaster. I thought we were on the verge of expanding the dream to reach more people. But what I saw was an organization in trouble, divided leadership, and toxic cliques.
So I tried to form a salvage plan, a way to preserve all the hard work. Maybe if I’d tried sooner. Perhaps friendships could have been saved. I’ve analyzed every misstep, retracing where things shifted. The noise started building again. There was no point in analyzing and asking questions. Like Charles Dickens said in Great Expectations,
The thing was done, whether well or ill done, it was done. And there was no going back.
So as I stood in disbelief at the sight of what once had been a hairline crack but now was a great massive chasm, I heard God whisper. “Do you want Me or do you want this dream?”.
But God, You gave me this dream! You blessed this dream! You opened doors!
“DO YOU WANT ME OR DO YOU WANT THIS DREAM?”
God’s will
Never in my life had my will stood face to face with God’s in such a clear way. In my hands was my kingdom of sand and if I let it go it would crumble into dust. But I had to let it go to take hold of His hand and His will for my life.
So I took a breath, closed my eyes, let the tears that I had been holding back fall and let go. Three minutes was all it took to undo three years of work. But in the middle of the pain and horrible crashing, crushing noises that followed, Jesus’ voice was in the middle saying,
“But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail.”
Luke 22:32
Rebuilding
I’ve spent the last year and a half since that day rebuilding. Rebuilding smarter. Making slower decisions. Someone gave me a card that said: “big dreams start small.” I decided that was what had happened. The dream had been too big too soon. My motto had been, go big or going home and like the foolish man I had built my dream on the sand.
So I started listening to different speakers about doing it scared and setting big goals so big they scare you. I made my lists, my vision boards, my big to-do list and broke it down to smaller ones. And God let me. He had to show me the truth. He had to show me that I was doing it all in my own strength.
I wasn’t ready to face the truth. My dream had been a crutch to deal with the stress of the bad things that had happened in our life. I used my dream to help me face my Daunters. The result was that my dream became a daunter and brought a whole bunch of uninvited guests with it. It deprived me of Christ’s power in my life.
I had got so caught up in trying to prove to the critics and enemies that I was more than capable and God was with me that I forget why I was doing everything in the first place.
The trauma of what we had been through had left me broken. Through that, I had let the wrong people into my life. I don’t think they meant me harm, who knows. I’m not mad at them, even when they continue to attack me years later. In the midst of this God has taught me the most valuable lesson about grace and what it means to truly love. It breaks my heart that the death of ‘my dream’ had such a profound effect on those around it that they have fallen into sin. They have become liars, accusers of the brethren, false witnesses, and slanderers. This was never what I had had in mind in the beginning.
So here I am at the end of this journey, decade, year. You see when God asked me to choose whether I wanted ‘my dream’ or Him and I chose Him, I forgot to do one thing. After I let go of the dream I forgot to take His hand. I stood there frozen and broken. Like a wave, the depression, grief, and every Daunter have overwhelmed me.
Undaunted
I started 2019 with the vision of becoming this Undaunted Woman that I’ve been blogging about all year and by the middle of the year, all I saw was a woman that was beat down to a bloody mess by her Daunters. Dreams can become Daunters too!
And that when it happened. Then I finally realized something! I don’t need a big dream, a massive goal, an inspiring vision. I just need to be in the center of God’s will!
No more goals!
You see this whole time I forgot to take God’s hand and let Him lead me out of this into His will. It’s a hard lesson to learn but it’s the place where He can actually start doing what He wants to do with us.
I read Phil Vischer’s autobiography “Me, myself and Bob” purely by accident, or so I thought. It was a God-appointed moment. You see what happened to his company Big Ideas was very similar to what I had been through with my organization. As I was reading it aloud to my boys as part of an education project I was fighting to not cry.
He talked about noise and vision and all the things that I had said. Someone was articulating what I had been through with words I hadn’t been able to find. Then God started to speak through his words.
The impact God has planned for us doesn’t occur when we’re pursuing impact. It occurs when we’re pursing God. In 2003, my dream died. And I discovered, once all the noise had faded away, what I had been missing all along. “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1)
Phil Vischer
So now I’m setting down the goals, the dreams, the visions, the noise. Getting distracted in the whole situation I lost sight of God and what His will for me is.
This year there will be no 20 things to do in 20, no word for the year, no goals, no visions. All I want from this moment on is GOD’S WILL! I’m so thankful God is patient. He has stood in the sidelines while I have spun my wheels, worked myself to death, and built my sandcastles. He stood there waiting patiently for me to come to the end of me and my work.
Like the song “There was another in the fire” says,
And when I look at the space between where I used to be & this reckoning. I know I will never be alone. There was another in the fire, standing next to me.
Will I always succeed in being in the center of God’s will? Probably not. I will have to choose every day to die to my will. But I’m finally seeing that it’s His power at work in me, not mine. If anything good comes from my life it will all be God’s handiwork and not mine.
So I’m taking God’s hand and walking forward to His will. And who knows what lies ahead!
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Chirst Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen!
Ephesians 3:20-21