Stay with Your Dream

I spent long hours travelling especially by road while I was working as a nutrition specialist. This provided me with the unique opportunity of time to reflect, dream and plan. During one of such trips in 2002, between Tamale and Yendi in Northern Ghana, I wrote down my desires which I hoped to accomplish by the time I retired. I recalled that list a couple of days ago and asked myself, what have I done with that dream? How far have I gone in pursuing it …?

My teenage son participated in a summer camp last year which had a profound effect on him. It was related to the major he is proposing for college (university) and it gave him his first opportunity to fly a plane. Subsequently, in preparing his college application, he was required to write an essay on where he hoped to be in 50 years’ time – at the end of his career. He vividly described the position he desired to be at and clearly articulated the process, his achievements and struggles along the way using his first flight experience as a guide.

I was impressed with the clarity with which he envisioned the end point of his career and articulated the process towards accomplishing it. The changes I observed in him after these events have been astonishing. He became more focused and disciplined in the use of his time and more diligent in his study—there is a passion driving him—a desire to see his dream come true.

Having a dream and a vision gives us a compelling reason to make the effort, to keep trying and to be focused. When there is no vision, people perish—they cast off restraints (Prov. 29:18). There is no compelling reason to stay on course. A vision dictates the course of action you take, what you permit to happen and what you begin to take charge of. It is a revelation of the will of God for your life. When you know that your dream is a revelation—an envisioning—of the purpose of God for your life, it drives your passion and guides what you do and how you do it.

Someone who has no dream, no vision and no revelation of God’s purpose and will for his/her life—no future ambition—will live his/her life aimlessly and without purpose. Such a person will accommodate whatever comes his way without making good choices—live wildly and casting off restraints.

You may never know it, but by staying with your dream, you will touch lives along the way. Your courage and resilience may be just what another person need to keep on in their own journey. If you give up on yours, you may cause many others to miss the way, be delayed or have to take a detour. Your life may just be the beacon God wants to use to guide others to the shore. You never know whose life you are impacting for good when you press on in the race.

If it seems hard or difficult today to find a reason to get out your bed or to take the next step, let this be an encouragement or a driving force for you—someone is waiting along the way to light his/her candle from yours, to receive an encouragement or a comfort because you stayed on. So it is not just about you alone, it is also about the lives you touch along the way.

Determine to take a step each day towards your dream. Even when it is difficult to continue, stay with it, don’t give up on it and hold firmly unto it. Sometimes it may require some tweaking here and there along the way as you fine-tune it. Fan aflame the passion that once fired that dream.

God has a good plan for all of His children to give us a hope and a future (Jer. 29:11). The things that He has planned for us are beyond what anyone can recount to Him, they are too many to declare (Ps. 40:5). His plans for us are too numerous to list. He has many remarkable interventions that surpass what we can anticipate. No word can describe nor any language express what God has prepared for those of us who love Him—no mind can conceive it to imagine it.  God’s dream for you is bigger than your biggest and wildest dream. If your dream is anchored on such a promise as this, you can not afford to give up on it – you stay with it.

“We must have VISION TO SEE our potential,
And FAITH TO BELIEVE that we can;
Then COURAGE TO ACT with conviction,
To become what GOD MEANT us to be!

So, possess the strength and the courage,
To conquer WHATEVER you choose;
It's the person WHO NEVER GETS STARTED,
That is destined FOREVER to lose!”

~ Author Unknown ~

Poem is from Your Dimension of Greatness.