Everyone believes life is a blank journal waiting to be filled with the culmination of dreams; instead, we deal with disappointments when the pages of our lives don’t mirror those dreams. But we were not born with a blank journal in our hands. Life leads us into the wilderness, and we wonder if we will find our way back to Eden, or how to move forward toward the promised land.
While we can’t rip out the pages of our lives, we are not narcissists of our narratives. What if the wilderness became our Eden? What if we could keep dreaming in a world of disappointments? Amidst the death or deferral of dreams, Emily Jansen is on the show today helping us reimagine our stories and pick up our pens again. She’s reminding us that God, the author of our stories, calls us to co-create with Him and keep dreaming despite our doubts. She shares how the wilderness might just be the very place of our greatest flourishing.
It’s not just a dream. It’s your dream, and it matters because God put it inside you. Will you dare to dream again?
Quotes:
“Seasons change and people make choices to be in your life or not, and re-calibrating new friendships over and over again can be a disappointment, but also a tremendous opportunity.”
“Growing up, my local community followed a trend of getting married young, settling down, and staying in the local community. I had a healthy discontent, and at 24, I found myself staring blankly at spreadsheets, dreaming of living in Africa.”
“I moved to Kenya for a year to mentor high school girls at the Rift Valley Academy. I also got to work in micro-finance with local female entrepreneurs, which led me to be involved in social impact investing later.”
“Every dream that resides in your soul is worthy and changes you forever if you choose to follow your heart.”
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen – “Pride is faith in the idea that God had when He made us; A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God’s idea of him.”
“I realized I had banked my entire identity around marriage and a fairy tale Disney story and had developed a sense of self-shame and idealized worth around something that I kept watching happen to others, but not me. “
“I had to decide that my life was good just the way it was and the sequence of events in my life didn’t have to follow a specific path.”
“Surrendering to the truth that God loves me (not just the world) has been the hardest battle of my Christian walk.”
“It really has boiled down to whether or not I believe that I am not an orphan, I am a child of God. Spiritual adoption changes everything.”
“An orphan mentality says, I’m alone and I can only depend on myself; a familial mentality says, I’ll never be forsaken and can completely depend on God.”
“I realized I was doing what made my soul sing. And that is the essential question – what makes your soul sing?”
Be curious to explore the areas of your life where you feel most grounded in WHO God made you to be and what He made you to do. If you’re living with God’s bigger Kingdom mindset, your career is suddenly a part of a much larger story.”
“What is the next beautiful thing you want to create?”
“Broken dreams can unlock new dreams.”
“Deferred hope is still hope”
“Your dreams don’t have an expiration date.”
“The deferral of dreams doesn’t mean denial. It’s one thing to accept delay – it’s another thing to assume defeat.”
“God doesn’t want us to feel defeated. He wants us to be dependent. In dependence, we find peace, because we’re letting Him dream with us too. You never know what God has in store for you.”
“It’s really in the mundane that my faith has grown the most. It’s where I’ve seen God work in the details and surprising places. If we’re only looking for God to act in the big things, we will never see His miracles in the little things.”
“We can partner with God in and through our dreams and the redemptive work conducted in the world.”
“Give God the space to place things in your hands and take them away. Prepare Him room.”
“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are. ” M. L’Engle
“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” CS Lewis
To be a love offering: “Sharing our pain, stories, heartache, and disappointments requires vulnerability. But from that brokenness and vulnerability comes a heart that can embody God’s radical love.”
Connect with Emily:
@emilyjjansen
@awildereden
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