A Bigger Dream

Recently, a friend of mine who had launched a business and had started receiving frequent orders called me and asked, “Do you ever feel inadequate or incapable of fulfilling what you set out to achieve?” The expectations from her were increasing, and suddenly she felt out of depth. Without even a thought, I answered, “every single day”. Not because I wanted to give the “right” answer, but because it was a feeling I knew too well.

I often find myself in a place where I am overwhelmed by the impossibility of my dreams, my goals.

It’s typically a place where my dreams are perplexingly impossible. Sometimes I take a look at my goals for the year, and think to myself “you must be so stupid for writing all these, uuchey”, and you’ll probably say I’ve lost my mind if you saw the list. The truth is, anything less won’t get me as excited. It only means one thing, I’m going to have to be so dependent on God because it’s very obvious this is beyond me.

I remember saying in a previous post (can’t be bothered to check which one) “If you wake up without a dream, go back to bed. If you wake up with a dream that isn’t big enough, go back to bed as well”. We must learn to be daring in our approach.

How, then, do I know I have a big dream? Write that dream on a piece of paper, now think of all the possible ways of achieving that dream, all possible resources. If your resources are sufficient to achieve that which you’ve written, you ought to throw that piece of paper in the bin and write a bigger dream; better still, pray-storm a bigger dream. God often picks up where our strength, finances and resources end. We need to wake up and be on the stretch to believe God.

“Our biggest shortcoming is low expectations. Low expectations of ourselves, and even more insulting, is our low expectations of God.”

Set goals with high expectations. Goals are just dreams with a deadline. And these deadlines, especially if your personality is anything like mine, are really lifelines. Without a deadline, I wouldn’t accomplish anything, just because of the procrastinator in me. And I’m sure many dreams die because they have no deadline. Deadlines keep dreams alive. Deadlines bring dreams to life. I recently set a deadline to finish the book I just started writing, and every day that date plays in my head. Knowing who I am, if I never set that date, I’d never start. When you write down a goal, it holds you accountable.

Let me dare you to set a bigger dream. Write down a bigger goal. Something that is bigger than you. Something more. It’ll be fun. After all, you’ll never achieve the goals you don’t set.

This post has a sequel, Pray-storm: How to achieve bigger dreams!