Big Dreams

Big dreams are scary. Let’s start there.

I know big dreams are scary; I have a lot of them, and they’re ever-evolving. It’s not always easy. I’ve sacrificed time with my family, I’ve misplaced friendships I wish I had time to locate, dust off, and try again, and I’ve been lonely at times, often for these very reasons. I’ve asked myself time and time again different variations of “What on earth were you thinking?” and “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

I do it because I believe in something bigger than just me. I do it because I believe in an overwhelming passion to make a better world and because I can see this same passion in all its varying degrees within others around me.

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Big dreams require change. That’s another whopper of a challenge.

My church has recently come upon a crossroads of sorts. To me, the choice is clear. I can see the big dreams forming, and I can’t help but be lured towards what I’m lucky enough to view as progress. The problem? Change is not easy. Change incites resistance.

I’ve encountered changes I fought tooth and nail until it was done. I remember leaking some fluid from my eyes as I cuddled my dog when I found out my previous church (truly, a church I considered home for many years) was being subsumed under the church I’ve now come to consider mine. I felt discouraged, afraid, sad, and angry. It’s a lot to feel all at once and even more to process emotionally. I didn’t feel excited, I didn’t feel adventurous, and I didn’t feel like it should’ve been happening. I felt comfortable and my little box was being turned upside down, forcing me to face reality. I had been away at school. Time was supposed to stop at home.

Not so. My big dreams for that little church were being laid to waste and I had no control over it.

So I resisted.

It was hard to start going to a bigger service with people whose names I didn’t know but who my mom and my sister began to recognize and talk to every week while I stood quietly by, smiling politely of course, simply trying to follow the conversation filled with names I didn’t know.

The church I navigate easily now, was not so easily navigated then. The gathering room and kitchen downstairs connects to a hallway (with a lot of rooms) that ends at a staircase that takes you to the greeters who usher you into the sanctuary, and the ramp at the front of the sanctuary takes you to the upstairs hallway with even more rooms which leads to a staircase which takes you back downstairs to the gathering room. Oh, and don’t forget all the doors to the outside or the staircase in the middle of the building that will put you out right in front of the sanctuary in the middle of a sermon. These things I can tell you now, I couldn’t have imagined being able to tell you then.

Instead of dying, my dreams got bigger.

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Have you ever stood at the foot of a mountain or the base of skyscraper that you looked up at and just thought, “Whoa. Big”?

You likely felt mostly awe, but maybe you also felt a twinge of fear matched by a simultaneous surge of exhilaration, and you had two choices: stay put or move. It’s the fear that makes us want to stand still and just keep looking at it, admiring it, in awe of it; it’s the excitement that urges us forward.

But when both emotions come simultaneously, it can be hard to know what to do, how to feel…

It’s then that you make a choice.