Journey of a Thousand Miles

As we get older, life becomes less magical. Our dreams get crushed, or we attain our dreams, but they are less glamorized than we originally thought. We become disillusioned, disappointed, and hopeless. We are forever seeking our Happily Ever After endings, and we are continuously crushed by the evils of this fallen world. We live in a constant battle of plot turns and villains and evil stepsisters. Our happiness seems to evade us, and we begin to disbelieve in magic and make-believe or even our dreams. But here's the thing: we were created for Happily Ever After. Our hearts and souls long  for the eternal ending we were made for, when good finally trumps evil and the bad guys are locked up forever. But we are constantly trying to achieve it with things of this fallen world. We think, "Oh, I will just live happily ever after when I..." Graduate high school Go to college Move out on my own Change cities Get a job Get a promotion Reach my dreams Get married Hav...

Here's the thing about closed doors: they free you from your idols. We tend to cling to things for our security, thinking they can free us from the despair that is crouching at our door, the hopelessness that is waiting for us just around the bend. Even when there's a giant wall blocking us from our idol, we try to find ways to dig a tunnel under it or climb over it, so we can make it to that one door of escape. But God works in different ways.  He knows what it takes to get us where He needs us to go. If that means closing the one door we set our hearts on, then His plans must be far better than ours. When all the doors to our idols become closed, we have to face the desert we've been avoiding- the desert of broken dreams, loneliness, and all the things we thought our idols would save us from. Closed doors are our ticket to freedom, and the pathway to get there is through the desert, where hope exceeds reality and its nearest companion is despair. If you are in ...

Here's the scary part about following your dreams: taking the first leap of faith into the unknown. I freak out every time I make a new decision, and I'm uneasy and filled with self-doubt until I realize that everything is going to be okay. It's kind of like when I first moved to Austin and signed a lease without having a job lined up- it was a haphazard decision made on a whim, but it was a move in the right direction towards everything that God wanted to accomplish in my life. “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” -Tony Robbins And guess what? It doesn't stop there. We are constantly having to make those jumps and leaps of faith if we are to fulfill the purposes He has in our lives. The important thing to know is that no matter what happens, even if we fail, God's got our back. He uses all our decisions, good and bad, for His purposes. So we need not be afraid to make the wrong decisions. Even if our dreams don't end up...