DAY 10: "Write It Out"

ENGAGING THOUGHT

How many times each day do you think you dismiss a thought?  Whether it's the random, "What would it be like to live underwater?" questions, or the "How many years would they lock me up if I removed the noisy-neighbor once-and-for-all?" type of musings, I'd bet we dismiss more thoughts than we actually hold onto.  That's both the beauty of our minds: we can contemplate, formulate, hypothesize, evaluate, and try-out literally billions of thoughts without ever committing to any of them.  That's also a potential downside, however.  As long as we're leaving those things bouncing around inside our minds they don't really exist.  Our thoughts are just abstractions: reflections upon our real (or imaginary) world.

WARNING: You are about to pass a point-of-no-return with the DREAM.  If you continue on past this point you will be committing yourself to some course of action.  This is the point that most people simply do not have the courage to get past and so do not fully realize God's DREAM for their lives.  DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE SIMPLICITY OF THIS STEP!!!

We're not interested in abstractions, though, when it comes to pursuing and living God's DREAM for our lives.  We're wanting more than just the thoughts of living His DREAM - we want the reality of it.  That means at some point we must get serious about this DREAM business, leave the abstract thinking/pondering/wondering stage and see if this thing can really fly!  You are at that point now in the 60 Days of Dreaming Challenge - time to move past the comfort-zone of easily-dismissed-thoughts and make the DREAM a concrete reality.  How?  Easy.

Write it down.  This simple task has HUGE impact upon your level of engagement with the DREAM.  When the DREAM is rattling around inside your head it really is no different than any other random thought: easily dismissed.  The moment you grab the pen or pencil and translate the thought or DREAM onto paper is the moment it now exists in concrete reality.  There it is sitting on the paper, staring back at you, saying, "Okay, here I am.  What will you do with me now?"  You can no longer dismiss it or be distracted from it - you must do something with that piece of paper.  You must make a choice about it.  You can crumple it up and toss it in the trash; you could carefully fold it up and tuck it away in a drawer, rediscovering it every 10 or 15 years like an old High School Yearbook, sighing and saying, "If only..."; you might post it on the bathroom mirror so that it's the first thing you see every morning; maybe stick it on the refrigerator door so that everyone in your family sees it.

See my point?  The one thing you cannot do with it at this point is just dismiss it as if it never existed.  That piece of paper with your roughly-shaped DREAM on it cannot be un-thought any longer.  Everything you do from this point on is now a decision that you are in control of; a choice that you are making in regards to the DREAM.  You can throw your journal into the fire and let it burn - you make that choice.  You can shelve it with all your other unfinished journals - you make that choice.  You can carry it with you as a reminder of the path you are on - you make that choice.  You can keep refining and honing and taking steps toward the fulfillment of the DREAM - you make that choice.

I like how God instructed Israel to erect a memorial when they crossed into the Promised Land   

"You shall write on these stones all the words of this law very distinctly" (Deuteronomy 27.8).

I won't go into all the Covenant specifications the stones contained, I want us to focus on the why of that action.  It was as if He was telling them that they had reached a point-of-no-return.  They had left their old life (Egypt) behind them, had followed God through the wilderness (purification along the way), and were now entering into His promise (DREAM).  We don't know, but I wonder how many times people were tempted to dismiss the memories and legends and return to Egypt - only to be stopped in their tracks by this massive stone monument with the recorded reality of their covenant relationship with God.  Staring them in the face, the written record of God's DREAM for them.  They could have banged their head against the stone - but it wouldn't have changed the reality.  You can't ignore the concrete.

ACTION STEP

Big surprise for today's ACTION STEP! You're going to write out the first draft of the DREAM.  I know, I know - it sounds like you're back in school and been given a homework assignment.  Sorry, but that's the next step forward.

TIPS: 

- Keep it simple and easily understandable (would a child be able to grasp what you are saying?); 

- Don't get hung-up on finding the perfect word or phrase, you'll have plenty of opportunities to tweak it later; 

- Try to state the DREAM in complete sentences;

Tomorrow we get to intentionally play the role of a pessimist (you're going to meet them eventually, may as well get a jump on them!).