The conversation always starts the same way:
“What do you do for a living?”
“Oh, I’m a writer.”
“Wow, what do you write?”
Usually at this point I fumble with an awkward answer involving books, newsletters, and snarky posts on social media. But several times I’ve been tempted to finish it like this:
“Actually, nothing. I get a few hundred words in, and then my computer is highjacked with random updates for the next three hours while I ponder a future of providing for my family by selling giant homemade peanut butter cups on the black market.”
Because we all want to live the dream, but few things go as we expect them to. And it turns out, the dream is a ton of work.
Over the last decade our family went through several life-changing, sometimes devastating transitions. We learned how to live in isolation. We learned to live with the unexpected. We learned how to deal with extreme limitations. We learned how to live without supports that many other families have.
And in the more recent years of owning a business and writing full time, we’ve learned to live with unpredictable (read: sometimes nonexistent) income. We’ve learned how to make routines that work for both of us — and eight kids — as we’ve navigated the difficult dream of doing work and ministry together at home.
Easy?
No way. Not for a single minute.
But it’s been so good. I’m learning again that we can trust Him. We can do new, brave things we never would’ve considered before.
On a good week, we start by clearing the rubble out of the way: Repenting, searching, asking God about those stuck places and what needs to be removed for Him to flow through again. I feel so inept at this, but He meets us when we recognize our weakness rather than when we pretend expertise.
Friends, every dream has come with more work than I could have imagined, and it takes more dedication than I sometimes think I have. I’ve learned to hold my expectations with an open hand, because without surrendering the dream to God, it becomes an idol – and then a nightmare. If we ask Him to use us, we must also allow Him to move us in ways we could not have expected.
But even still, God wants us to dream. He doesn’t put these things inside us to tease us.
If you find yourself up late at night, thinking of new ideas and new dreams that He’s giving you, and you have no idea what to do with them, write them down and look them straight in the face. You can put them on screen or on paper, but at least give them some tangible words.
And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.
– Habakkuk 2:2
Ask Him if it’s for real, if it’s for now, if it’s for just you, or if it’s for you and some others He’s also talking to. Tell Him He can do what He wants with it. Get gutsy, go all out, and tell Him He can throw you right outside the small margin of comfort zone you might have recently recovered, and pitch you right into His exciting, marvelous, bigger-than-we-could-possibly-come-up-with-on-our-own mission.
But friends, that dream you long for? That calling you’re working toward? That victory you’ve prayed for? You have to choose between it and the comfort zone, because they do not mingle, they take each other’s oxygen, and only one of them finds victory in surrender.
He is always growing us as far as we are willing to move.
Just because things don’t look the way you expected doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re not perfect at predicting the future (which you’re not meant to be) or controlling outcomes (which you’re not meant to do).
If you are struggling with these transitions, please know that it takes time to settle into routines that work. It takes trial and error, and the error doesn’t mean failure. It means growth. It means you’re getting closer to the solution that puts all the pieces in the right place.
For those of us waiting for a labor to end, and for the promise of fullness to come to fruition: There is a messy beauty to works in progress. And we are all a work in progress.
This season is teaching you to let go of those expectations and trust God. It doesn’t mean you lower your standards; it means you raise your eyes. You are learning to look past this present circumstance to see His vision for you, which is bigger than you imagined.
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This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume three: Clarity in the Longing. You can find it here.