Comprehensive Dreaming

Tuesday December 26, 2023

“God can do anything, you know - far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams.” (Ephesians 3:20)

Dreaming is supposed to be comprehensive.

Somewhere along the way toward “success” and “efficiency” and “optimization” our culture distorted the exercise of dreaming.

Nowadays, the little time spent engaging in dreaming seems to have a heavy bent toward the material world. Our dreams tend to drift toward some supped up resolution around accumulation.

• Win the tournament

• Get the scholarship

• Land the job

• Purchase the thing

• Do more / achieve more

Not a thing wrong with dreaming about and pursuing things of this nature. Dreams like this can add color, meaning and purpose to our lives.

But if we’re not careful we’ll spend our whole lives dreaming for our circumstances to change without dreaming for our character to change.

We’re over here settling for dreams around circumstantial change when dreams of character change are available to us as well. Dreams that impact WHO we are and HOW we go through life, not just WHAT we acquire things and WHERE we do the acquiring. Dreams like:

• Change of our internal well-being

• Better stress response, less anxiousness, and better control of intrusive thoughts

• Living more days with internal contentment

• Living with a posture of gratitude all year - not just the final two calendar months

• Increase of positive relationships in concentric circles from those closest to us working outward

• A sense of internal margin, operating out of a deeper well (less frazzled and overwhelmed all the time).

If we really do believe that God is able to do anything, and he can unlock things in our lives that are out of reach on our own, then why do our dreams seem to always settle in just the material realm?

The tournament, the scholarship, the job, the thing, the doing, achieving and all that is great. Chase it with full force in 2024! But let’s not forget to dream about all the other components of living a life on purpose.

It’s time to normalize dreaming for character change, not just circumstance change.

Stay The Course