God-sized Dreams

Where Dreams Set Sail

Because We Were Made With A Dream In Our Souls.

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It was a regular day, like every other one before it. We were running on auto-pilot and a few cups of caffeine with a splash of caramel.  Recalling the list I forgot to write down, yet rolling tasks around like a rotisserie of uncompleted ‘to-do’s’, I was challenged by my brave creative dreamer who’s been watching me all her life.

“What did you want to be when you grew up, Mom?”

I replied immediately, then corrected myself, then stopped…silent. She laughed; I didn’t. The realization that I had forgotten what I wanted to be, unsettled me. As life progresses we are told what we can be, should be, ought to be and those initial dreams fade away.  Or do they?

“God-sized dreams make their way into our hearts, homes, nights and every other area. Sometimes they feel like an insistent knocking on a door within us. We can’t get any rest until we let them inside.” – Holley Gerth

The reality is that our dreams are a part of the fabric of our souls. The woven pieces God sews when he forms us in the deep; intricately, wonderfully, fearfully made for glory because we are image bearers.  Unformed you were seen by the God who called light from dark and breathes life into dust.  And all your days were written, your end is seen from your beginning by the Creator of all things good.

You were already known, dreams inscribed in your soul, and considered precious before you were born.

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You knit me together…I am fearfully and wonderfully made….Your eyes saw my unformed substance and in Your book all the days of my life were written before they ever took shape. – Psalm 139:13-14,16

Every dreamer ought to read Psalm 139 and remember that we were made on purpose, for a purpose, with a purpose.  We were intricately woven with skills and strengths and talents to spill out in every season of our journey by a God who saw our life in total.  And the dreams that He gives us are not about us, they are about Him…they are about the Kingdom of God manifesting grace right where we are.

God-Sized Dreams allow us to glimpse the mysterious and reach toward the majestic.

We often think our dreams have to be lofty and unreachable. And we teach our children to shoot for the stars, yet we settle for the moon  We struggle with the boxes we didn’t check and goals we wanted to achieve, but forget that the dream is still possible.  It’s still out there in the vast horizon that exists, yet we forget we were made for something else… for more.

So what if you choose to believe it?

What if you asked the hard questions and were brave enough to answer them?

Friend, you were made with a God-Sized Dream imprinted on your soul. 

When my daughter asked what I wanted to be, she wanted to know what I dreamed I could become. She wanted to know the passion that fed my soul and the fire that fueled my purpose.  She was challenging me to step up to the ‘more than moment’, daring me to declare that dream inside.

“…the calling of your soul is about more, so much more than anything you might hope to gain from it.”- Holley Gerth.

Sometimes, life throws us curve balls and our goals change with the direction we are going, but our dreams don’t have to cease. Those strengths within you, those skills that enable you, those talents that equip you to succeed are built upon the experience and living that forged and refined them. Just because we haven’t arrived at the climax of our dream doesn’t mean we aren’t still on the journey or we can’t start one now.

So what if that dream is bigger than you are, or harder than you thought, or people think you are crazy! Don’t let the way you think a dream should look limit your ability to move forward, and don’t let your dream pass you by.

“You don’t have to be sure about your dream before you move forward. You only have to be certain of the One who is whispering to you…”- Holley Gerth

Praying you can step into that dream He has fashioned just for you today.

Blessings!

Dawn

Shared by: Dawn Boyer

 

                                                   

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When God Redeems Those Dreams You Surrender…

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Unbelief is a robber of grace. It diminishes our ability to hope and destroys our creativity to dream. It is the opposite of the affirming promises found in God’s Word. We can see the enmity that it places on the promises His Word affirms clearly, like a weapon of the enemy to steal, kill and destroy what Christ came to give.

I have come that you may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance, till it overflows.
John 10:10 (AMP)

Unbelief is a deterrent of purpose. It distracts us from the path we were meant to walk on. It steals and destroys and weakens faith till it is inactive. And not only faith is diminished by the arrows of doubt, but dreams wither and die in the adversity it seems to shadow over our lives.

If we have faith, if we believe God, He will show up…He will reward our diligence.

Hebrews 11 talks about faithful dreamers who were prompted and urged and provoked to big faith. A Hall of Fame recounting those who chose brave faith in spite of what they did not see…dreamers who dared to dream dreams. Right in the middle of this narration is a conjunction of sorts, a phrase that joins the beginning to the end, the origin to the goal, the idea to the dream. It’s a reminder to each of us, who choose to dream with God on this journey, that belief is rewarded not so much with our hope but with God instead.

But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
Hebrews 11:6 (NKJV)

Sometimes it’s the ordinary dreams that take the greatest amount of faith.

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There is a dreamer who wasn’t mentioned by name in this chapter, but her story rivals those summarized there. A recounting of those who did something extraordinary things out of ordinary faith all because they made the choice to seek first the One Who is the original mover of every dream.

Hannah is one of my heroes in the book of women who believed God for something bigger than herself. She had a simple dream that took mountain-moving faith to see fulfilled. Her narrative tells us who she was identified as, Elkanah’s wife; what was lacking in her life, children; and what she did, she prayed.

What strikes me about this first chapter of Samuel is not that Hannah felt unloved but rather unpurposed. She knew she was loved and favored by her husband, but it wasn’t enough. In her distressed and bitter state, she prayed to the Lord to fulfill a dream…to fill her soul with the resurrection of a broken and unmet goal. She went to the altar of grace and poured her dreams out of her soul into His hands in an action of surrender and trust.

What Hannah didn’t know, which is similar to each of us now, is that the fullness of the unrealized dream could never come to fruition until the timing of His fullness was met within her.

With a prayer of desperation and vow of faith, Hannah sought the only One Who could meet her need. She begged for a remembering, a resurrecting and redeeming of the hope that had been deferred by time and lack and loss. In one act of faith, a surrendering of herself back to the Lord Who planted the spark within.

As Hannah went to the temple to pray, she knelt low to surrender her dreams, she asked to be remembered, she poured out her soul in faith.

She went for a miracle and she left with God.

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Hannah went seeking provision for her deepest hurt and found the God Who supplies provision for her every need. Surrendering all she held in her heart: dreams, goals, wishes and bitterness, envy, hurt, she let go of the disease of unbelief. In her weariness, she asked for grace and was met by peace. Her countenance was changed in a way that was both felt and seen. It was in that moment, where she decided to surrender it all in search of the ONE Who fills us as nothing on this earth can, that she found the miracle she seeking.

Like Hannah, when we surrender all we have and all that we are on the altar of His grace, we will find that the One Who fills us is also preparing us for the dreams He has encrypted into the very fabric of our souls.

Right in the middle of every dreamers story is a pause, a waiting space of holy hope which has the power to impregnate a faith seed so powerful that it will change us completely.

She came to the throne of grace to receive well-timed help in her time of need. She came believing that He is Who He said He was. Not only did He resurrect her broken faith, rerouting her unbelief and changing the course of her destiny in the narrative of her story, He redeemed every broken dream, fulfilled her surrendered goals, and filled her with a seed of promise that would define her.

Praying that you will find your way to the altar of grace today, to surrender all that is in your heart to the One Who is waiting to fill you with all He has prepared for you.

Shared by: Dawn Boyer

                          

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When We Dream With God

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Life often resembles the cycle of the seasons, where time and opportunities, lessons and living are all tumbled together. They meet us whether we feel ready for them or not. Sometimes those early plans and hopes feel like a shadow of what we now know, and because life gets busy we choose practicality over dreaming. We can forget what it means to dream big.

Unbelief  limits the God-appointed dreams within your heart and self-doubt distorts the truth of His role in them.

A dreamer is defined as one who dreams, an idealist, a visionary; one who sees what is possible and believes that it can happen. Yet when our focus becomes what we can do instead of what God will do, we are surrounded by a sea of doubt and a unbelief.

Unbelief will stifle a visionary. It can make us forget how to dream because we are exhausted by life. We let fear hold us back from stepping into the shallow edge of possibility, we doubt that we are capable to swim through the deep waves full of the unknown. We measure hope against our circumstances and decide we are simply not enough. We doubt ourselves rather than believe God.

Self-doubt is a thief of grace. It takes what God gives as favor, unmerited and unearned, and alters the view before us. It is a lie that we sell ourselves, a commodity we actually buy repeatedly, so that we can protect the fragile dream we hold inside. The one that longs to be called out, to be impressed and enlisted,  for a work that has eternal implications. Because self-doubt tends to limit our ability to dream, we can miss His grace.

When all we see before us, are our own limitations and lack, we let the thief steal those dreams where abundant hope spills faith and fuels goals. (Romans 15:13)

When we choose to believe the impossible is not possible with God, we stop dreaming because we have fixed our view on the temporal rather than the eternal.  (Mark 9:23)

When we let our fear of inadequacy reflect upon His complete provision for our lives, we let the dreams that he planted in the secret place become stagnant and still like a boat set adrift on a sea without a crosswind.   (Psalm 139:15)

But God calls us to look out over that sea of grace and to dive into His goodness…to dream big with Him.

It’s a step of faith to dream with God.

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He is both the compass that directs our path and the creative force that inspires us to dream. Buried deep in the secret place, intricately woven by God, is where our dreams exist. That place where we  inhale hope and exhale faith. The waiting place of endless possibilities, where God leads us to navigate our dreams boldly and overcome every storm.


His Word provides a gentle reminder of the way faith overcomes doubt and unbelief and encourages us to keep dreaming. Hebrews 11 is full names and legacies  and dreamers who believed God for big things. Each life represents  a story and a promise they believed would become a reality, even if they didn’t actually see it. They were credited with faith because they believed in the unbelievable. They were called dreamers but God called them faithful.

And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.
Hebrews 11:6

What if coming to God and dreaming with God required the same kind of faith?  

If we come to God, we must believe that He is, and He IS exactly who He says He is.

That is part of our reward, dreamers. It is the  inheritance of drawing near to the One who sees our end from our beginning, has engraved our names upon His hands, has given us authority over every work of the enemy, and is greater than the obstacles we face. (Psalm 139:16, Isaiah 49:16, Luke 10:19, and 1 John 4:4)

Where are you letting self-doubt steal those big dreams? Look with eyes of faith, dreamer, and Dream Big with God, today!

Shared by: Dawn Boyer