Dream Big

This post is inspired by this excerpt from the book, 'Becoming Myself' by Stasi Eldredge. 

I am digging in to this book and learning so much!

"Most Americans (80 percent) say they don’t have any dreams, and we can imagine why. Life can suck the dreaming right out of you. The living God wants to pour those dreams back in. Sixteen percent of Americans say they do have dreams, but they don’t write them down. Four percent have dreams and desires, and write them down, but less than 1 percent review and update them on a regular basis.
It is the people who allow themselves to dream, who own their dreams, who write them down and look at them periodically, whose life dreams are coming true.
It’s good to dream. We can’t out-give God. We can’t out-love him, and we can’t out-dream him. Give yourself permission to dream big! Dream deep. Dream wide.
Because the thing about dreams is, dreams come true…
Awakening and owning the dreams that God has placed in our hearts isn’t about getting stuff or attaining something. It’s about embracing who we are and who he has created us to be. In him. He is our dream come true, and the one true love of our life. But we can’t love him with our whole hearts when our hearts are asleep. To love Jesus means to risk coming awake, to risk wanting and desiring."

~Becoming Myself  Stasi Eldredge

We get hurt in this life, all of us do, and we close up, shut down, distance ourselves from our dreams and desires - sometimes without even realizing it. As a young adult, I convinced myself that I was an even keeled, un-emotional person. I was happy to let things slide off my back, no drama!

(And then I fell, and I mean fell in love...but that's another story :) So I found that when I opened my heart again, I was also open to pain. I've spent a lot of my life opening up and then shutting down.

 But even though it feels more safe to keep our heart at arms length this is not how our Heavenly Father intended for us to live. 

God has been slowly but surely peeling back layers in my life and guess what, it is painful and messy and scary. But it is also beautiful and real and so rich! I am learning to dream and wonder at all the beauty on this earth, and be thankful.

So I'm making an incomplete list of dreams. Because, who knows, right?!

If you want, let me know what a few of yours are too. This will be fun!

My Life Dreams

To learn to paint. (I want to be able to put on paper some of the beauty that I see around me - old houses, flowers, blue skies with puffy white clouds)

Visit Ireland. (I want to see all that green up close)

Open a little shop.

Sing like Eva Cassidy.

Buy houses, renovate and resell. (Big dream)

Travel more.

To have a wonderful, handsome husband. (Got that!)

Beautiful children. (Got them!)

To be happy. (Yes, I'm learning)

To build an herb garden using old bricks.

To be beautiful, graceful, wise - inside and out.

I'll add to this list as I think of more.  I'm not going to say that some of these dreams are impossible - that's not the point! 

And some of these dreams started when I was young and have been realized. I love that!