Daring to Dream Again in 2017

For those of you who know me in real life, you will know that I love to plan.  I am a planner through and through, and I love spending time planning, developing and working on projects.  This teamed with my mild obsession with stationery means that I own a ridiculously large number of notebooks and have tried almost every planning system going!  If you would like to know how I plan my life and keep myself organised, please ask in the comments and I will write a blog post or perhaps even film a video.

Anyway, I have digressed a little - I love to plan.  People who plan are not just people who like to organise but fundamentally we are dreamers - our plans involve looking at what we want to see in the future and organising the steps to get there.

Last year, I planned and led a mission trip to St Kitts - the planning started one whole year in advance.  The plan involved putting together a team, coordinating flights and accommodation for the team, arranging training sessions, organising prayer meetings, liaising with churches and developing an itinerary for the 2 weeks.  It also involved ensuring that the team knew what their roles & responsibilities would be on the trip, as well as ensuring that our host church was kept up to date with our day to day plans throughout the trip.  It was exhausting, stretching and awesome - I loved it!!!  There is very little that compares with the satisfaction of seeing something that started as a dream in your mind come to life.

These pictures were taken on our penultimate day in St Kitts.  We are enjoying one of my most favourite views in St Kitts at the top of Brimstone Hill (we went up there to have our final debrief for the trip) - I remember thinking "You actually did it Celeste!".  I could not believe that what had been a dream for almost 10 years had finally come together and I was now sharing parts of St Kitts I loved with people I had bonded with in a new and special way as we "wrapped up" our mission trip!  It was an overwhelming moment!

So I love to dream and I have always prided myself on being a dreamer but recently in a discussion with a friend I began to realise that I had closed down my dreaming ability in certain areas of my life.

Daring to dream is exciting and exhilarating but when you are having to wait for the dream - you can start to become reluctant to get your hopes up.  As someone who automatically starts to dream as soon as a new idea crosses my mind, it can be difficult when you have been dreaming, planning and mapping out your future in faith and you get to the point where you start to question the whole process because it hasn't happened yet.  This laying down of hope can be a dramatic decision to stop dreaming, or a gradual fading away of enthusiasm and focus until suddenly one day, you realise that you have lost hope.  The interesting thing about the gradual fading process is that you can still appear to be on the "faith" walk  - you continue to say all the right things, but when you look deep down you know that the hope is gone and you're not really standing in faith any more.

So my recent discussion has led me to look at going back to dreaming and hoping in those areas again.  It is a challenge and as I can still remember how painful the disappointment felt.  But I know that God is challenging me to go back to walking in some crazy faith, so I'm going to go for it.

This blog post is a special shout out to all who have become weary in waiting and stopped hoping due to being beaten down by disappointment and delay.  Maybe it's time to get back on the faith walk - will you dare to hope again?  Hebrews 11:1 says "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."  - faith starts with hope so are you willing to get your hopes up?

Let's make 2017 - a year of hope!  Dare to dream again for with Him all things are possible!!!

Until next time,
Cece
xxx