Have you ever reached a point in your life where you’ve hit the end of the road? The point where you literally have to choose to step out in faith and walk on water! Well I’ve hit it! And it’s scary at first but amazing and exhilarating to say the least. What’s so scary yet amazing is that this is the point where you completely give yourself over to God because it is only by His power alone that we can stand. It takes a lot of trust and courage to get to this point because Love is so awesome that we can feel afraid to approach Him. In our human brokenness it is easy to shy away from Love yet Love is our only way to life and freedom. We need Love in every way! Let me encourage you today… No matter what you may be facing currently in your life, you are not alone! You are loved and loved beyond measure! Don’t give up hope! Breakthroughs are on the way and closer than you think.
Let me pray for you:
Dear God, You are so faithful and loving. I come before your mercy seat and pray on behalf of the person reading this. Please forgive our sins and lead us into everlasting life. Lead us with You to walk on water and to live in complete freedom. Teach us to love you and love one another with all of our heart, soul, and mind. You are awesome and we love you! Please heal, deliver, and restore us. In Jesus name, Amen ❤
I usually like to start my blog posts with a scripture or quote… Today I decided to share on of my poems with you. I hope that this poem will inspire and encourage you if you can read and relate in any way. I will also include (as I usually do…lol) a youtube video that really touched me. Finally let me pray for you today…
Dear God,
In the name of Jesus I come to you on behalf of the person reading this today. I pray for wholeness of heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit. Save the lost Daddy and bring them home to you today. Please heal them of every illness and set them free to live the life you have willed for them to live. Bring them to a place of complete surrender where only you alone can be their God and cast down every idol in Your precious name. Thank you God for your faithfulness in answering our prayers. You are awesome and we are so blessed to be Yours. We love you ❤
“You have to dream before your dreams can come true!” ~A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
I love starting out each post with some food for thought that sets the stage… I know it’s a short quote and may even seem obvious when you first read it, but really and truly there is so much depth in the quote. It is profound. I encourage you to take a moment and just read it again. Notice that there is a process that takes place when it comes to actually realizing or achieving our dreams. We must dream in the first place! How many of us have buried dreams that are so near and dear to our hearts? How many of us have actually stopped dreaming altogether?
I was at a leadership seminar earlier this evening and the speakers shared a lot of helpful information about success and leadership, but what was most vital is that there is a beginning point to success and it begins with a dream. Tonight I was asked a question about what my childhood dream was and then I had the privilege of witnessing one of the speakers share how her childhood dream is now (many years later) coming true and that was so moving and inspiring. I was inspired to actually stop for a moment and reflect back on my childhood and ask myself what my dreams were. Sadly I thought about the fact that I didn’t really have any dreams of who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do when I grew up. I knew immediately why that was and realized that I did have a dream, but my dream was different, and maybe somebody reading this can relate. My dream was birthed from a broken heart. My dream was for my family – that my parents would stay together, be in love, and not get divorced. Sadly they did and not only was my heart broken but that also crushed my own dreams for family in the future. Failed relationship after failed relationship, then illness followed by depression only reinforced that the crushed dream was indeed impossible. Only recently has the dream that once seemed impossible to me actually start to seem possible again. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think it’s common among little girls to dream of having a family of their own one day. We play house with baby dolls, etc. I hear my little cousins say they can’t wait to have babies one day. I realize that I was actually envious of them because they were children and they had more confidence and belief than me when it came to having a family one day. On an even deeper level, a part of why that dream seemed impossible, is because I have struggled with fear of not being capable of being a good mom. The enemy used my childhood experiences to torment me and feed me lies. Thankfully God’s light is shinning where there once was darkness and the lies are being replaced with truth. I am being renewed daily and I’m so thankful to my sweet Lord for His awesome work in me.
Recently, I visited a sweepstakes giveaway dream home as a dream building exercise with my leadership team and we were asked how this experience inspired us. I wasn’t inspired by the fancy home, but instead, the dream that was buried so deep in me was beginning to be awakened and revived because I was inspired by the idea that a family could live in this home – my future family. So my childhood dream which is so near and dear to my heart is to have a loving family of my own.
Now, maybe you’re thinking well that that’s out of my control. If you are, you are absolutely right! My life is in God’s hands and He is in control of whether or not I live to get married and to whom and whether or not I could even have children, but I’m not worried because even though those events are not in my control, I do have control of whether or not I prepare myself for this dream becoming reality. If my mentality or mindset is one of scarcity instead of abundance, I won’t be prepared to receive the blessings God has for me. I do have the option to prepare for my dream but first I have to begin by dreaming it and believing that with God what seemed impossible to me is possible with Him. The Bible says to delight yourself in the Lord and he will grant you the desires of your heart. I’m trusting God in faith for this dream!
So now I turn the stage over to you… Did you have a childhood dream? What was it? What dream is near and dear to your heart? Let’s stop waiting and start taking steps, then strides, then leaps towards running this race of life toward living out our dreams and experiencing the live we’ve always wanted!
Don’t waste another moment! “Your chances of getting your goals and dreams in this life greatly diminish when you’re on the wrong side of the grass.” ~Tim Marks~
Dear God, Thank You for bringing back to life the dream that has been buried deeply for so long. Lord I surrender this dream to You and place it into Your hands knowing that You are indeed the author and finisher of my faith. You know the desires of my heart and I trust that as I delight in You, that You will grant them. I pray that Your will be done in my life. I also pray for every person who comes across this page and for those with dreams that need reviving, please help them Lord to look to You first for the hope that is needed to truly live a life of freedom and possibilities. You are awesome God and I love you. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen ❤
Have you ever been in the way of achieving your dreams? Have you tried to drive full speed ahead to realizing your dream only to be stopped by the car in front of you and you think its a roadblock but when you take a harder look its actually a mirror in the road and the car you are seeing is really yours? If you’ve answered YES, then you are certainly not alone! I’m right there with you.
Recently, before beginning this blog, I was inspired to make the choice to dream again. Dreaming is great, but achieving those dreams is awesome! I’ve come to realize however that on the road to making those dreams happen I need to make some personal changes otherwise my dreams will not be realized and they will just fade away into the darkness where nobody would’ve known that they even existed but me and God. I don’t know about you, but I want to do my part in making my dreams become reality. I’ve also realized it’s not going to be an easy ride, there are going to be obstacles along the way, and right now I’m the biggest one.
One of my dreams is to be a great person of influence – a leader! I desire to be able to practice what I preach and preach what I practice especially if my desire is to help others live the best life that they possibly can. In achieving this dream it’s apparent to me that before I can be used to help anyone, I need to be helped first. My heart needs changing, my mind needs to be renewed and I need to be stripped away of old habits. I’m overwhelmed and overtired, but I’ve resolved not to give up! I’m going to start by reading a book I recently purchased called Confidence of a Champion by Tim Marks. It a book that is aimed at helping you become who you were created to be by letting go of lies from the past. I’ve included a link to where you can purchase the book in case you maybe interested in joining me on this journey 🙂 Confidence of a Champion
I’m excited for the journey ahead and my prayer is that God will prepare you and me to receive and make use of every tool that He provides for my success and yours on this journey to achieving our God-given dreams. May His will be done in the name of Jesus. Amen ❤
“And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord and wept in anguish.” (1Samuel1:10)
The above passage of Scripture refers to a woman named Hannah who grieved over her inability to have a child. Today I related to Hannah in her bitterness of soul as I prayed to the Lord and wept in anguish. While my circumstances may differ from Hannah’s, in that my sadness has nothing to do with not being able to bear a child, I can certainly relate to her heart. When I turned my pain over to the Lord today, my question was “How long is this going to hurt?” In trying to understand my pain, and why I was hurting so much, I realized that I was grieving a loss. Nobody physically died, but I did lose someone that I had invested a great deal of myself in, and suddenly this person is gone from my life. It hurt a lot! But thank God for His precious love for me. God is so faithful! As I was in prayer, the Lord led me to a scripture in my bible: “And she said, “Let your maidservant find favor in your sight.” So the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad.” (1Samuel1:18) The life lessons note in my bible regarding this specific Scripture says the following: “Hannah left behind her grief, not when her circumstances changed – they hadn’t – but after she poured out her soul to the Lord. Because of her grief, she connected with the Lord on a level she had never known.” ~Charles Stanley. This was a huge act of faith on the part of Hannah! She had stopped eating because of her grief and sadness but here in this Scripture she went away after her prayer and ate and was no longer sad. She had placed her faith in God and trusted that He would grant her the desire of her heart. In Hannah’s prayer for a son, she also vowed to dedicate her son to the service of the Lord which was a selfless act on her part. That was her sacrifice onto the Lord. Later Hannah conceived and bore a son!
I was so encouraged by this today and I hope that you will be too. Nothing is too big for God and He can certainly make your dreams come to pass when you put your trust in Him. Let your fear become your fuel for faith. Turn to God in prayer and pour your soul out to Him. This isn’t the first time I’ve turned to God and in the past He has always been faithful even when the answer wasn’t what I expected.
Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all of your heart; Lean not on your own understandings. Acknowledge the Lord in all that you do and He will direct your paths.”
“This is my command: Love each other.” ~Jesus Christ (John 15:17)
Have you ever felt so incapacitated when it comes to love, especially the ability to truly love others? …without expecting anything in return? Have you ever felt sick and tired of being sick and tired? …being stuck in a vicious cycle? Well if your answer is Yes, then know that I feel you! I can certainly understand what it feels like to feel incapacitated and to be sick and tired of allowing that to rob me of pursing my God-given dreams. One of the dreams I had before I even entered into a relationship with Jesus was to be able to experience true unconditional love and then to express that love to others. Interestingly enough the two greatest commandments are to first love God and second love others. Tonight God gave me a bit of a reality check in the sense that I’ve realized that I can be a selfish person at times. Most of the time I’m consumed with “me”. Consumed with what’s going on in my life, what going to go on in my future, what I look like, how I’m feeling, how I’m growing and maturing in my faith, how I can keep myself busy so that God-forbid I don’t risk being/feeling alone, blah, blah, blah, me, me, me… I’m not saying that it’s wrong to think or reflect on oneself but even in that it should be done do the glory of God. I’m realizing that I’m way to consumed with myself. Please excuse me if I come off as being hard on myself it’s just that I’m writing from that place of “sick and tired”. I want change, I need change. I want to stop caring so much about myself and what others think of me and start thinking more and caring more about others. The good news is that I’m at a place in my life now where I can finally be free to live out my dream. Not only have I been introduced to true unconditional love, but now as a grateful believer in Jesus Christ I have God’s Holy Spirit living on the inside of me which empowers me to not only love God, but to love others as well. God has loved me so much that he sent Jesus to die for me and now through the awareness of that love, I’m willing to die to my selfish ways so that I could love God first and then others for His glory. It is His love in me that enables me to express it to others, it is not of my own power or ability. I’m excited to step outside of myself and allow God to use me to share His love with others and to share the reason for my hope. I’ve already started looking at volunteer opportunities in my area. I’d love to actually go on a missions trip at some point in the future when the timing is right, but for now I want to start right here where God has placed me, serving in my everyday life.
If you have a desire to love and help others, but you just haven’t reached out yet, maybe out of fear or insecurities or even selfishness then I encourage you to take the focus off of yourself and to place it on God. Look upward and not inward. Step outside of yourself and ask the God of the universe to show you His love and then to show you how to love like He’s loved you. Don’t sell yourself short of the life that God has planned for you and don’t give up on your dreams.
My prayer tonight is taken from the song lyrics of Hosanna:
Dear Lord, I come before you and confess my selfishness and pray for your forgiveness and mercy. I thank you in faith and ask that You would change me Lord for your glory. I pray that you would show me where and how I can love and serve others and that Your will be done. I also ask the following prayer in the name of Jesus:
Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like you have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am for Your kingdom’s cause
As I walk from earth into eternity
Amen ❤
I’ve included an awesome remix to Hosanna! Hope you enjoy…
“I wonder how many Kingdom dreams have died at the feet of the enemy, who convinces people that their work might be criticized or rejected. Fear has a way of carrying God-planted dreams into dark corners, while the Accuser hisses a single, debilitating word: Coward. Heart thumping, you remember how you’ve failed before. You remind yourself of false starts. Fearful of repeated failure, you tame your marvellously delicious dreams. After a while, you forget that you had those dreams in the first place. You coax them into submission, until they become slippery mirages. And then eventually, your dreams slink away, disappearing behind the baseboards of your bedroom wall. They are nothing anymore. And no one will ever know the difference. Because you never told. And you never tried.” ~Jennifer Dukes Lee (Love Idol)~
hopetodreamagain 