If you'd like to hear the audio of this along with further discussion, check out the 8000 Promises podcast hosted by my friend, Adi Tilford. We had an amazing converstation!
Dreams, desires and longings and how they might tie into God’s will for our lives. That was the subject Adi told me this series was going to be about when she asked if I’d be interested in being a contributor. She also mentioned that she was excited to hear my perspective which “has some more life behind it.” Ha ha! I had to laugh and reply, “that was a very kind way of saying I’m old!” But I certainly have to admit that as I have gotten older my ideas about dreams and desires and God’s will have evolved quite a bit.
The older I get the more time I have to spend in my own head, thinking through my own thoughts on things - which in one sense sounds lovely and quite a luxury, but in another sense I've come to realize that it's a dangerous and even unhealthy thing to spend too much time in our own thoughts. We tend to be a very self-
centered lot, humanity, and so much of our thinking can be spent on me, me, me and how decisions or situations or relationships or whatever, affects me, is good for me or my dreams.
Now that's not to say that self reflection is bad - or even thinking about our own well-being is bad, but I've found that if left to our own devices for too long we can easily make everything about us! But what was that first line of The Purpose-Driven Life that so many of us (older) folks read so long ago? "It's not about me."
While God certainly wants each of us to know how very beloved we are, I've come to land on a very basic theology for life in general. I truly believe that God simply wants us to learn how to be loved and to love, well. That's it. Nothing else. Now certainly that can look a lot of different ways for a lot of different people. Some really need to learn how to love themselves, just as they are, and others might need to learn how to love others well and get outside of their own wants and needs. Then when you start talking about dreams and desires and longings it can easily go back and forth between being all about you and how you might make your mark in the world OR all about how you can make the world a better place or others' lives better.
I know there was a season in my own life and many others' as well, when we become more aware of the gifts and skills, education and personality type that we've been given and some of us think, "What am I supposed to do with this? What does God want me to do, specifically, to be salt and light, using the gifts he's given me?" It can be a daunting question and for many, it felt like there was a single answer that they needed to discern or discover and then execute. I had friends who were stressing out if they hadn't figured out what that "calling" or direction was.
Personally I went many years trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I finally figured it out in my forties and then did it by fifty and since then it has morphed and evolved and turned into something very different than what I'd originally envisioned God calling me to. But I think that's the point. In hindsight I see that there were all sorts of possibilities of what I could have done or which direction i could have gone and I truly believe that they're all viable, valid and within "God's will." I think we can get stuck thinking that there's only one right answer to our questions about God's will and our life's work (which usually includes our dreams and desires). . . . And I say "work" very loosely because sometimes it's a paid profession or vocation and other times it's a calling that you do however you can fit it in.
I thought I was being called to be a pastor in a church, which I did for four years. But then the last seven years I've been doing work outside of the church, at a multi-national corporation no less, and as I look back I can see God's hand at work teaching and growing me, helping my dreams bubble up once again in a very different way. I've spent so much more time in the last seven years with people who don't know Jesus and I've been blown away by the Christ-likeness of so many.
It seems that the older I get the more the "boxes" of belief I had about God, about how God works and God's expectations for us continue to be blown apart. I think much less in specifics when it comes to my theology and a lot more in generalizations because the truth is...we really don't know exactly how God works.
What we do know is that God calls each of us beloved. God made each of us uniquely and creatively and gave each of us gifts and skills and "bents" in how we are. I don't believe that God expects us to take any one certain path but simply says, "Here you go! I've given you lots of tools to start with and you'll pick up more along the way, and I'm going too! I'll be right there with you, so go for it, have fun, learn how to love well, and enjoy the journey!"
