Harnessing Dreams for Reality

In today’s world, I often hear derogatory remarks about dreamers. It’s as if dreaming has become a bad thing. The truth is, some dreamers have lost the connection between their dreams and reality!

photo Credit: Public Domain via Pixabay

That disconnect between dreams and reality can happen to all of us. As children we often have dreams of what we’ll do with our lives or what we would like to do or create. And while at least some of those dreams are unrealistic and are rightly laid aside as we mature, it is also true that some dreams that were meant to live and change the world, die alongside the unrealistic dreams.

Nothing great has ever happened that wasn’t somebody’s dream first! So dreaming is a good thing. If you can’t dream it, you can’t make it. Before you build your dream house, you first needed a dream to model it after. Before you started your dream company, you had to dream, and envision what it would look like. How then do we harness the power of those dreams to affect our reality?

Think of your dream as a horse in front of the chariot! The horse empowers the chariot to move. The chariot represents your current reality. If the horse dies, your chariot is going no-where! So don’t let your horse die. Make sure you keep feeding that horse so you’ll have the power to move your reality along. But a dream disconnected from reality leaves no impact.

Your dream connects to your reality by the two harness poles or shafts. These poles are faith and action. Faith without works leaves you dead in your tracks just as surely as no dream at all. You can also think of the faith pole as hope, positive thinking, or belief, that you can attain your dreams. And the action pole can be seen as discipline or actionable goals. If either of these breaks, the other one will snap soon after. Like faith with works is most certainly dead, so action without belief that you can do it, is stomping about without purpose.

So for your dream to have an affect on your reality, you must have the belief that you can do it, and you must work on those actionable goals. If either is lacking, then you will become what we call dreamers in today’s world.

Make sure your dream is worth following though. This dream/horse can be fed both truth or lies. If you feed your horse lies, you will find yourself places you never meant to go in the future. But if you feed your horse truth, then the results will be true too!

Not every dream we can dream is God-given. We need to become discerning, and if it is not God inspired, don’t hitch your chariot to that horse. The good news is, that if you are confident that the dream you are pursuing is of God, then your faith becomes confident, and your actions become sure.

Each of us were designed uniquely. God intended for us to fulfil His purposes here on earth. So the dream that God gives you will reflect how He has designed you. He will use your talents and your strengths. He may even wake up passions and bring out strengths in you that you are unaware of now. And it will almost certainly be behind a wall of fear. Fear doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. It just means there may be dangers we need to look out for. It can also mean, that you are realizing that you need to step beyond your comfort zone and trust God. You might think of fear as a call to faith. Fulfilling our God-given dreams require us to live and choose on purpose. Without faith it is impossible to please God in our daily life.

What is your dream that is still lying behind that wall of fear? And what kind of action steps will you take to get there?