Putting a dream in to motion is not something you can do all by yourself. Even Joan of Arc had to recruit a few troops. Convincing people that you really are following a God given vision isn’t always easy. I mean not to be harsh, but most people have never really struck out to do something bold and audacious in order to be who they want to be. Most people are content to look around, find the expected and easy path for their lives, and stick to it.
So when you come along and declare, “Follow me and France will have victory”, people tend to think you are psych case. The truth is if you chose to give life to your dreams, you are not normal, and that’s a scary thing for our friends and family to face. This why it is often hardest to tell the ones you love about this personal vision. We know that they know all our flaws, our stupid mistakes, and all the reasons we aren’t qualified to do this.
I wish I could tell you to be bold and all will end well, but as we all know even Joanie’s world got a little heated due to her boldness. But way before that she had people who believed in her, who followed her, people who used their power and connections to help her pursue her vision. My question is do you have the audacity to demand to be heard in the courts of the king? Are you that passionate about your quest? Or are you content to stay home and whisper it to the chickens? If there is a stake in your future are willing to face it, content in the knowledge that you did everything possible to make it happen?
You have to tell people about your dreams. You have to be willing to face the skeptical faces, questions full of doubt, and you have to be bold. It means talking to everyone, and I do mean everyone, about what you intend to do. You tell your friends, your family, and the stranger at McDonald's because people are the key to seeing the dream take flesh.
One of the truly amazing things I have discovered is that God has way of bringing the right people into your life, if you are looking for them. Consistently he has placed people in our path who have a talent or ability that we needed to make a certain aspect of Pagus happen, and often the people we thought would be the ones to fill these roles are the first ones who run screaming to the hills.
I cannot over emphasize this point. It feels awkward, even arrogant, to go around telling people that you are capable of doing something as awesome as fulfilling this dream, but you have to find the words to share that vision. You have to find a way to make others see this dream as a reality. They have to have something to believe in and since you were the one entrusted with this vision that job is yours.
In some ways this is the most fun part of all of this. You get to share your vision, your hope, and somehow in just speaking the words it becomes even more of a reality through just saying it aloud. You can get so caught up in describing the dream that you can forget you have an audience, and in those moments people find your passion contagious.
In other ways, it is the most difficult. I still find myself stuttering through a simple presentation I have given over and over again when I am introducing myself and Pagus to a new audience. I start filling the blanks of a conversation with what I imagine that other person must be thinking about me. I interpret their questioning looks as amused dismissal of me and my ideas. So when I say, you have to break that habit, know I am speaking from a place of experience and not throwing any stones.
Some could argue that Joan of Arc was terrible failure. I mean after all, all most of us really know about her is that she burned at the stake, but the point is hundreds of years later, we know her. We remember her, and I would have to say that is a victory. I hope yours and my dreams have happier endings, but if we are remembered, if following our dreams is noteworthy in history, isn’t that some sort of victory? Think about it, one nobody country girl from Nowheresville, France changed a nation just because she was willing to follow her dream, to speak passionately about the things she believed God called her to do.
The Bible says the power of life and death are in the tongue, and nowhere is this more evident than in the lives of our dreams. How else to do they come to life unless we give it to them through our words?
When my youngest daughter was four, she asked “What if we all just God’s dream and He wakes up?” After I recovered from my aneurysm, I realized the truth of what she was asking. God is by no means asleep, but even you and I are his dream, one he gave life to through his words. Think about it, what if he had never spoke up?
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