What do you want to be when you grow up?

One of the questions all of us were asked most growing up was, "what do you want to be when you grow up." At a young age it feels as though the world is at our finger tips. Many children will answer, a doctor, a nurse, an astronaut, a policeman, and the list could go on and on. When I was in Second grade, my teacher had us create a time capsule, to open our senior year of high school, and one of the questions was what do you want to be when you grow up. When I opened mine years later I had written, a zookeeper, it made me laugh because I had no recollection of ever wanting to be a zookeeper.

If you grew up in church you were taught memory verses and one of those was most likely , Philippians 4:13 " I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." For most of us, there was an age when that was much easier to believe than now, when most of our time was spent playing, when we weren't so concerned about what the world believed we could do, and when our views of ourselves and what was possible for us were not yet construed by our sins and the sins of the world.

I remember as early as 4 or 5 sitting in front of the TV and watching commercials of the starving children in other parts of the world and thinking to myself, one day I'm going to do something about that and I'm going to change the world. I believe at that point in my life God began to put a dream inside my heart to do something big. In second grade I can now vividly remember a teacher handing me a paper asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up and wanting to write " I want to change the world" but I was afraid of what others would think, so I wrote down something that I heard someone sitting next to me say.

A few weeks ago I attended a conference and heard the story of a middle schooler who dreamed of one day moving to Texas and starting her own pastry shop. Something about her story completely through me off guard that day and It took me at least a week of processing to realize why. All of us have dreams of doing big things when we are young, like I said we are taught " We can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. " but there is a point in most of our lives that the world begins to distort our view of what we can become. For most of us that begins at a pretty young age and these days you can find very few middle schoolers that still have dreams as big as starting a business of their own one day.

For me, I can remember God putting dreams in my heart as early as 3 or 4, of changing the world, but then towards the middle of elementary school, through pain my view of what I could become through Christ became distorted. Then at the age of 11 addiction came in and killed my dreams of ever becoming anything, for the next 11 years. That's my story, for some, like me it was addiction, for some it may have been abuse, for some you may not have grown up in a church or in an environment that taught you that you could do any thing through Christ who strengthens you, for others those dreams may have never died

As I said, around the middle of elementary school my dreams began to dwindle and by the age of 11 my dreams of changing the world had died. Now lets fast forward to when I became a Christian at the age of 21. At that point I believe I began to dream again, but I also became so caught up in what I thought my path to changing the world would look like that I took things into my own hands. I chased after jobs, opportunities and people that were never meant to be mine and I walked away from things that didn't look as though they would lead me to where I wanted to end up but they were Gods path for me. I am pretty stubborn so it took a really long time of walking through doors I shouldn't and having doors shut in my face before I truly let Proverbs 3:5-6 take hold of my life, " trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and he will direct thy path"

I turn 26 in two months and part of me wants to freak out because the place God has me in right now looks nothing like the dreams that I know he placed in my heart years ago. I have to believe that no matter what things look like at this moment, if I trust in the Lord with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding, one day I will see my dreams come into fruition and that God is working all things together for my good as long as I love Him (Romans 8:31.)

Today if you are in a place where you are living your dream, I want to encourage you to spend time encouraging those around you to go after theirs. For me it took a middle schooler who was still dreaming, to spark my dreams again.

If you are in a place where your dreams have died and if you're honest you might not even know what they are so you are just going through the motions of life, I challenge you to spend time in prayer asking God to revive them again and reveal them to you again

If you are in a place where your dreams are alive but the place God has you in right now looks nothing like where you want to be right now, I challenge you to " Be still and know that He is God" ( Psalm 46:10) He has placed you in this season for a reason and still has more planned for you than you could ever ask or imagine ( Ephesians 3:20,) Also stay in constant prayer asking for God to reveal to you what He is trying to teach you in this season.

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